Jon Fosse, award winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, in Vaim, in western Norway, begins a trilogy of novels set in a remote Norwegian fishing village. Jatgeir travels from the fishing village of Vaim to the city in search of a needle and thread. Cheated twice, he returns to his boat, where he falls asleep as weaves rock the hull. Soon he is awakened by a voice: a woman is calling his name from the quay. There stands Eline, the secret love of his youth – and the namesake of his boat- with a packed suitcase. Eline pleads to come aboard. In what follows, this single encounter reverberates across three stories: three narrators, three deaths.

The first new work from Jon Fosse since he was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, Vaim is spectral novel that wonders and watches, imbued with things half-seen, perhaps not of this world yet still caught in its rhythms. The novel continues his investigation into the human condition: the subtle encounters that come to define our lives and our deaths, and what lies in the threshold between what is and what is longed for.

Fosse’s writing emerges from a place of reverent silence, a relic from his time attending silent Quaker meetings in Bergen, before his conversion to Catholicism. Vaim, enters the conversational cadence of another person’s mind, their personal atonements and idiosyncratic desires.

Vaim by Jon Fosse, Translated by Damion Searls, Fitzcarraldo £13, Transit Books $26, 120 pages.