The half brother

Get hold of The Half Brother.

by Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen.

I think I'm not just being chauvinistic when I say that this book ought to be among our chosen ones! I'll admit to being slightly biased – I love this author... And even though they may not all reach World top 100, they're all worth reading, and this one stayed with me SO long after reading it I didn't remember the next book I read (or even which one it was!) even just after finishing it...

To read "all" about it, you can read this, but below I'll paste a brief summary from Dublin City Council:

From the Book
It is Thursday 8th May, 1945, and Vera, our mother, is standing deep inside the drying loft in Church Road, unpegging the clothes that have become dry and soft up there in the course of the night. And she laughs quickly as she stretches up to the slack clothes lines which feel rough against her fingers and which can easily sting if she isn’t careful. It’s Vera, our mother, who stands thus, alone in the drying loft; she laughs and drops the wooden pegs down into the wide pocket of her apron, and carefully places item after item in the woven basket
beside her. She is warm and she is thinking of nothing; she’s just full to the brim with a great and curious joy, like nothing she has ever known before. Because she feels new now. There has been war for five years and in the summer she will be twenty; and it’s now, right now that her life is beginning…

About the book
The Half Brother is an epic novel, covering the lives of four generations of a far from ordinary family in their Oslo flat. At the heart of the drama we find Fred, the boxer, conceived after the rape of his mother in the drying loft, and his younger brother, Barnum. The two half-brothers lead very different and separate lives, until they are brought together again at their mother's deathbed…

About the Author
Lars Saabye Christensen is Norway’s leading contemporary writer. He is the author of ten novels as well as short stories and poetry. Christensen has won many prizes, including the Tarjei Vesaas Prize for First Fiction, the Critics Prize and the Bookseller's Prize. The Half Brother won The Nordic Prize for Literature 2002. His writing has been published throughout Europe, in the USA and in Pakistan. He lives in Oslo and Sortland (Vesteralen).