If Only

NYPL's Best Books of 2024

A groundbreaking, potent novel about the destructive force of romantic love from award-winning writer Vigdis Hjorth

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.

So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Author: Vigdis Hjorth
Publisher: Verso Fiction
Published: 09/03/2024
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 7.80h x 5.00w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9781839768880
ISBN10: 1839768886
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Family Life | Marriage & Divorce
- Fiction | Feminist
- Fiction | World Literature | Norway

About the Author
Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award and Nordic Council Literature Prize. Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023.