Aliss at the Fire

From the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a haunting masterpiece exploring love, loss, and human fate.

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle’s great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse’s vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on.

Jon Fosse is one of Norway’s most important contemporary writers, since his 1983 fiction debut he has published prose, poetry and over forty plays. Fosse has been awarded a lifetime stipend by the Norwegian government among countless other accolades, and is one of the most performed living playwrights today. He was the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Damion Searls is a writer in English and translator of German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. His translations include work by Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf; his translation of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction.