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  • Published: 31 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9781473524538
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

T Singer




‘A kind of surrealist writer’ (Haruki Murakami), who ‘doesn’t write to please other people’ (Lydia Davis). T Singer is the new novel in English from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers, proving ‘good literature makes us wiser about life, ourselves and other people’ (Dagbladet).


The new novel in English from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers.

T Singer confronts indomitable loneliness in Solstad’s classic, heartbreaking yet darkly comic style.

‘A kind of surrealistic writer… Serious literature’ Haruki Murakami
‘Mad, sad and funny… Thrilling’ Geoff Dyer

Singer, a thirty-four-year-old recently trained librarian, arrives by train in the small town of Notodden to begin a new and anonymous life. He falls in love with Merete, a ceramicist, and moves in with her and her young daughter. After a few years together, the relationship starts to falter, and as the couple is on the verge of separating a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer’s life…


‘An utterly hypnotic writer’ James Wood
‘Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence…’ Sunday Times

Winner of the Norwegian Critics Prize

  • Published: 31 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9781473524538
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Dag Solstad

Dag Solstad is one of Norway’s leading and most celebrated contemporary writers. Solstad has won many Norwegian and international awards, most recently the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize in 2017, and is the only author to have won the Norwegian Critics Prize three times. All three of his novels already published in English – Shyness and Dignity, Novel 11, Book 18 and Professor Andersen's Night – have been listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Also by Dag Solstad

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Praise for T Singer

Since he published his first book of stories in 1965, Dag Solstad has been to Scandinavian literature what Philip Roth has been to American letters or Günter Grass to German writing: an unavoidable voice.

Paris Review

He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature.

Haruki Murakami

He doesn’t write to please other people... Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea… the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story.

Lydia Davis

His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

In Norway, Solstad is as celebrated as, say, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison [in the US]... An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer.

James Wood

Solstad is a writer of depth.

Peter Handke

Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist.

Per Petterson

Solstad’s unusual, entertaining novel of restrained humor follows its protagonist, T Singer, over a lifetime of nonengagement... [it] brilliantly shows the humor and pain of obsessiveness, and the anxious, analytic Singer emerges as an enduring creation.

Publishers Weekly

Solstad’s construction of reality is uniquely his own… mad, sad and funny… the behavioural possibilities of the novel are subtly and fundamentally enlarged.

Geoff Dyer, Observer

An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice – insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast – is impossible to ‘unhear’ once you’ve encountered it.

The White Review

[Solstad] is a wonderful stylist whose prose gives the impression of not being stylised at all… The prose is distracted and persistent, compelling and compelled.

Frank Lawton, Literary Review

Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves.

David Mills, Sunday Times

Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . reminiscent of Witold Gombrowicz, with his keen sense of the absurd. Both translators Tiina Nunnally and Steven T. Murray have rendered Solstad's rhythms into wonderfully idiosyncratic English.

Nathan Kapp, Times Literary Supplement

All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist.

Charles Finch, New York Times

Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation – here it’s a failed librarian – turn banality to sublimity.

The Arts Desk