I Curse the River of Time Winner otf the Literaturpreis des Nordischen Rates 2009

Per Petterson is a profoundly gifted novelist Richard Ford

"Per Petterson is a profoundly gifted novelist" Richard Ford "Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely... Petterson has the ability to be simultaneously restrained and terribly tender...Extraordinary skill... There is a quality that I can only call charm, or something like charm, to Petterson's essentially dark and lonely sensibility." New York Times "Petterson applies candour, sensitivity and humour to his intimate studies of life as lived by us, the ordinary majority, and the result is singular magic...resoundingly human...All the inevitability of life, its fragile glue and the doubts that stalk the survivors are summoned and considered in Petterson's candid, allusive fiction. There is no easy sentiment, only genuine emotional power...Tender, masterfully evocative" Irish Times "Spare, cool, precise prose...a powerful evocation of the difficulty of communication within families" Evening Standard "I Curse the River of Time is a work of blackest tragicomedy, a novel as cold and scintillating and desolate as the northern winter landscapes that are its setting." -- Rachel Cusk Guardian