The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Even those who have lost everything, still have something to lose.
An American woman wakes up alone in a tent in the Norwegian mountains. Outside a storm rages and the fog is dense. Her phone is dead. She has no map, no compass, and no food. How she ended up there, and the tragic details of her life, emerge over the course of this novel. We discover that Jane is a novelist with a bad case of writer’s block—she had come to Norway to seek out distant relatives and family history, but when her trip went awry, she tethered herself to a zoologist she met by chance on the plane, joining him on a trek to see the musk oxen of the Dovrefjell mountain range.
At once elegant and gripping, The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland moves seamlessly between Jane’s life in America and the extraordinary landscape of the Norwegian mountains. As we gradually unpack the emotional debris of her past—troubled Midwestern parents, a loving courtship in New York, and a cruel, sudden tragedy that rearranged everything—we begin to understand what led her to this lonely landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Norwegian novelist Houm's austerely wrenching and darkly comic novel, his first to be published in English, is assembled out of jagged pieces that gradually cohere to reveal a heartbreaking picture. The reader first meets Jane Ashland as she lies on her back in an icy Norwegian mist, contemplating the prospect of freezing to death. The story then leaps to her flight to Norway from her home in Wisconsin, during which she meets an attractive, self-assured, and occasionally irritating zoologist named Ulf, who studies musk oxen. Bit by bit, the reader is introduced to Jane's uncommunicative parents, her enthusiastic psychiatrist, and the events that have led her to flee Wisconsin, where she has a disastrous encounter with some distant relatives and takes off into the wilderness with Ulf. The excitement of the first pages of the novel wears off as the shape of a predictable narrative emerges from the initial flurry of hints and clues. Even so, Houm maintains the momentum of the spare novel, in which new mysteries constantly emerge as old ones are resolved. Not so much a conventional thriller as a psychological study of the reverberations of trauma, its impact deepens even as its suspense lessens, resulting in a winning novel.