by Lars Mytting
The leaves of the walnut trees rustled in the breeze. But above their crowns stood the large birch tree, tall and unshakeable, with branches so thick that they did not sway. And there, through the foliage, the sun cast its perpetually shifting patterns of light and shadow upon us.
IN THE LATE 1990S, THE BUILDINGS ON HAAF GRUNEY were destroyed by a furious gale. Today the island is a nature reserve and home to a colony of storm petrels, who, for reasons unknown, orbit the churchyard at Norwick before they set out to sea.
LARS MYTTING, a novelist and journalist, was born in Fåvang, Norway, in 1968. He is the author of Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, which has become an international bestseller and was the Bookseller Industry Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2016. His novel Svøm med dem som drunker, now published in English as The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, was awarded the Norwegian National Booksellers’ Award and has been bought for film.
PAUL RUSSELL GARRETT is a translator from Danish and Norwegian of novels, plays and books for children. He is also Programme Director for a new theatre translation initiative, [Foreign Affairs] Translates!
* “Love from God . . .” – a Norwegian psalm
