It's Fine by Me - by Per Petterson (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Author of Out Stealing Horses
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Fans of Per Petterson's other books in English will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In It's Fine by Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun's first day of school he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo, Norway. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine by Me is a brilliant Scandinavian novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses and I Curse the River of Time.

Review Quotes

"Superb writing." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting--all shafts of light and clear palpable chill." --Time

"Petterson's youthful novel is an openhearted bildungsroman....His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry." --James Wood, The New Yorker

"Spare, slim, and haunting, It's Fine by Me...offers the same moody prose and brilliantly unsentimental character revelations that have made Petterson a literary star." --Caroline Leavitt, The Boston Globe

"The melancholy story, and the superb writing that propels it, are both raw and honest--the brutality of the father, the disregard of printing-press colleagues, the ugly street fights--and also deeply compassionate." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

About the Author

Per Petterson won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into more than thirty languages and was named a Best Book of 2007 by the New York Times, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, and many other publications. He is the author of In the Wake, To Siberia, I Curse the River of Time, and Out Stealing Horses. He lives in Norway.