‘More than good enough,’ Anna says, wrapping her arm around me in a friendly fashion. I want to saw her arm off, but her presence feels so right at the same time, so much so that I soften in this false sense of security. ‘It’s not about being good enough or not, you know that, this is your approach too, after all.’
Perhaps she just wants to demonstrate my own theories in practice, I think to myself, introducing a glimmer of hope. So I can understand that she’s the only one I long for, that she longs for the same thing. To live with me, us and us alone, our whole lives through.
‘You don’t want to end up like your parents, after all,’ she says, smothering any sense of hope.
I leave her flat in Majorstua, then stand behind a tree and watch the front door of her building for what must be an hour. Paranoid and fit to burst. How about dinner tomorrow? she asked, kissing me unbearably briefly on the lips before I left. Maybe, I said, smiling, pulling my shoelaces tight with such speed that my shoes almost went up in smoke. I punch my clenched fist against the tree trunk four times, but I’m all that breaks, and I can’t deny how much it hurts.
I call Liv.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Helga Flatland is already one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize.
She has written four novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family, was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has lived and worked in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and now lives in York where she works as a freelance translator. Rosie was a candidate in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for Norwegian in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett. She translated Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal for Orenda Books.
COPYRIGHT
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
First published in Norwegian as En moderne familie by Aschehoug Forlag in 2017
First published in English by Orenda Books in 2019
Copyright © Helga Flatland, 2017
English translation copyright © Rosie Hedger, 2019
Helga Flatland has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–912374–45–8
eISBN 978–1–912374–46–5
This book has been translated with financial support from NORLA
A Modern Family Page 26