Norwegian by Night
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4.4 • 20 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Sheldon Horowitz — 82 years old, impatient, and unreasonable — is staying with his granddaughter’s family in Norway when he disappears with a stranger’s child. Sheldon is an ex-Marine, and he feels responsible for his son’s death in Vietnam. Recently widowed and bereft, he talks to the ghosts of his past constantly.
To Norway’s cops, Sheldon is just an old man who is coming undone at the end of a long and hard life. But Sheldon is clear in his own mind. He’d heard the boy’s eastern European mother being murdered, and he’s determined to protect the child from the killer and his Balkan gang. With an endearing combination of dexterity and daring, Sheldon manages to elude the police in what is hostile, foreign territory for him. But what he doesn’t know is that the police and the gang both know where he’s heading.
Norwegian by Night is the last adventure of a man coming to terms with the tragedy of his own life as he tries to save another’s. It combines laconic, deadpan humour, moral seriousness, visceral grief, and narrative tension in a remarkable way — and Sheldon, in particular, is about to become a famous fictional hero.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Miller's first novel features an unlikely hero, Sheldon Horowitz, an 82-year-old widower suffering from dementia. Haunted by his Korean War experiences and his son's death in Vietnam, Sheldon has moved to Norway to live with his granddaughter and her husband. On hearing a violent argument outside his family's Oslo apartment, Sheldon opens his door to a Slavic-looking woman and her small son to offer them refuge from an assailant. The assailant kills the mother, but Sheldon manages to protect the boy. While Sheldon tries to keep the child safe, the police investigate the murder. Moments of humor, such as the time Sheldon bluffs his way into a fancy hotel room, enliven the narrative, but Sheldon's philosophical musings can wear (e.g., "Sanity is the thick soup of distraction that we immerse ourselves in to keep from remembering that we're gonna bite it"). This works better as a study in character than a crime novel.
Customer Reviews
Norwegian by Night
An incredible read. So well crafted that right to the end I was held in suspense; the characters so richly brought to life that I have to agree with the author in his final notes: Sheldon is real! Weaving past and present, reality and imagination ... This novel, or rather Sheldon! takes the reader into his mind so vividly that we share his elderly aches and pains, and are drawn into his philosophising on the nature of family. A fabulous book.