FRIDAY NIGHT FEVER had arrived on Værøy. Dance night at the pub with a local band playing. When you’ve been living on a tiny Arctic island for some time little things like that get your pulse racing. I felt like a seventeen-year-old all over again. Oh, how the memories come flooding back. At seventeen I was a […]
Category Archives: Novels
FOLLOWING MY RUN IN with the gorilla at the Aker brygge shopping mall, Kari called a taxi and told the driver to take us to Majorstua. If only my arm hadn’t been in a sling I would’ve knocked the gorilla’s block off. Nobody messes with Knut Pedersen and walks away with his body intact, I […]
GOOD NEWS for all my readers! Scientists have now confirmed that reading novels like Pedersen’s Last Dream can cause biological changes in the brain that act as a booster, which can linger for up to five days or more. Admittedly, the researchers at Emory University in the US did qualify their findings by specifically using the words […]
MY FLIGHT from the ghost town was on. The Lithuanian students would drop Mark and I off, on their way south, next morning. As they’d been far from happy with the paltry wages they’d received from Olau, in return for their long hours of labour, there was a sense of schadenfreude in the arrangement. Even […]
I’M ON A TRAIN. It’s late at night. Or perhaps it’s midday and the train is an underground train. Sometimes, in dreams, you can never tell. “Look at our friend over there,” I say to someone, who suddenly appears at my side, while pointing to a drunk talking to himself further up the train, “I […]
THERE IS A SECRET island far beyond the Arctic Circle where people don’t lock their doors at night for there is no fear and there are no thieves. An island where small children play on homemade rafts in sparkling waters on summer days that last forever. A secret island where sea-mist clouds roll lazily over mountain tops […]
AFTER MY HORRIBLY disturbing consultation with Dr Finkel, I felt very disorientated, so I went to the Deichmanske library where I knew I could relax. Apart from that, my main motive was to read English newspapers without having to buy them. That they were often a couple of days out of date was of little importance. […]
EACH NIGHT my grandfather finds my mother not in the house he goes out looking for her. I can see the pain in his eyes. He won’t let me go with him. And he won’t let my grandmother go either. Even when she pleads. She could be anywhere. He might find her huddled against a […]
“LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I’d fallen onto a railway track just as a train was pulling into a station.” Glancing towards Dr Finkel I saw he was staring at his fingernails like a man who’d never seen fingernails before. He grunted for me to continue. “It was in London. There was nothing scary about it. […]
THE ODDEST THING on the day of the accident occurred at the hospital. Well, not the oddest, exactly. Suffering an accident in the first place was fairly odd for me, insofar as I don’t have them every day. Not major ones, at least. In fact, thinking about it, it was probably the very first serious […]
Pedersen's Last Dream 