A powerful novel from the North, winner of national book awards both in Norway and Sweden. Its hero is Edmund Saknevik, orphan, outcast and seeker, who has returned from exile to Norway to farm his ancestral estate. Yet the past endures in the traditional celebrations, the prominence of the church and the bitter memories of the Nazi occupation.
People still love, plot and keep grim secrets.
Edmund's attempt to reclaim his history, his language and his purpose in life, as well as to preserve his country's culture and environment, retells the timeless and universal story of a man seeking to regain paradise, to make a home in the world and to redeem past mistakes, both his own and those of his family. Ave Eva is a dark, brooding and yet brightly courageous work with the power to speak to any reader, whatever his or her homeland. Its author, Edvard Hoem, is a major writer of modern Norway, following in the radical tradition of Knut Hamsun and Jens Bjorneboe. He has written poems, plays and ten novels, and recently he collaborated with the composer Henning Sommerro on a song cycle and a passion play about the last days of Christ. He also has translated several plays by Shakespeare into Nynorsk.