Professor Andersen's Night

Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist

Per Petterson, author of Our Stealing Horses

Dag Solstad, Norway's most distinguished living writer, is a clear-eyed moralist who takes an existentialist's interest in the compromises, evasions and accommodations we make to get through life... Wryly humorous and needle-sharp in skewering pretension, Solstad is unlike anyone currently writing in English... A deeply rewarding novel

Sunday Times

[An] exquisitely composed novel... Dag Solstad is an unflinching explorer of the plight of educated humankind in the face of the inexplicable whose artistry matches his ambitious theme

Paul Binding, Independent

At times dark and moving, even, on occasion, unexpectedly funny, Professor Andersen's Night tackles a premise which would prove just as intriguing in a pacey thriller... It is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one man's life in all its sticky, existential glory

Scotland on Sunday

This is a subversive little novel in which morality becomes a football. Whereas Novel 11, Book 18 pivots on a decision that defies everything, Professor Andersen's Night confronts morality, justice and compromise. Dag Solstad, who is frequently compared, with some justification, to Chekhov, has written a moral, almost allegorical novel in which he is far less interested in heroics than he is in humanity

Irish Times

A clever psychological inaction thriller, which uses the witnessing of a crime as the catalyst for a midlife crisis

Guardian

Four stars- fascinating

RTE guide

Solstad has an outstanding ability to portray mental processes accurately; here, the bleakness of Andersen's outlook is offset by the lightness of the prose, nimbly translated by Agnes Scott Langeland, and by the wry at humour at play in it

Times Literary Supplement

A penetrating combination of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Camus' existential ennui and Larkin's social embarrassment

Times Higher Education Supplement

At times dark and moving, even on occasion, unexpectedly funny...It is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one mans life in all its sticky, existential glory.The book’s icy prose and long sentences – which in the wrong hands would feel heavy and laboured – flow with a quickness that hints at the workings of Andersen’s mind, and Solstad has a way of producing at the protagonists bourgeois anxieties desperately sorry for him

Alice Wyllie, The Week

Solstad, Norway’s most distinguished living writer, is a clear-eyed moralist who takes an existentialist’s interest in the compromises, evasions and accommodations we make to get though life. Wryly humorous and needle-sharp in skewering pretension, Solstad is unlike anyone currently writing in English

David Milss, Sunday Times

Forget the Scandi crime production line and turn to this sly thriller

Claire Allfree, Metro Scotland

A wry moral tale exploring the little evasions and compromises of everyday life. Translator Agnes Scott does justice to Solstad’s measured voice

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

This short-but-striking novel quickly reveals itself to be…crime fiction, yes, but also a subtle and deeply introspective consideration of the inertia of lonely middle-age, its philosophy existentialist in the manner of Jean Paul Sartre, Ingmar Bergman and certain novels of Georges Simenon. The result is a highly complex and accomplished work

Billy O'Callaghan, Irish Examiner

Intriguing tale… Solstad expertly navigates the bizarre mind of a clever but lonely man locked in an existentialist nightmare

Telegraph

This is no straightforward crime novel…an exploration of guilt, inaction and moral quandaries

Nic Bottomley, Bath Life

He’s a kind of surrealistic writer, very strange novels. I think that’s serious literature

Haruki Murakami