If Only

A passionate, boundary-breaking bestseller from one of Norway’s most acclaimed novelists—perfect for readers of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein.

She is thirty, married young, and already the mother of two. It is the dead of winter: January, minus fourteen degrees, frost clinging to the spruces and the mailbox, though above, the sky is clear and the sun has returned. In her diary, she confesses she is waiting—for the heartbreak that will reveal her true self. What she feels instead is a looming sense of doom, perhaps even death.

First published in 2001, Vigdis Hjorth’s daring novel fuses the raw, yearning intensity of Ernaux with the tragic scope of Anna Karenina. At its heart lies a searing question: can passion be mistaken for love? And what devastation awaits a life built on that mistake?