Repetition : A Novel

Author: Vigdis Hjorth

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 3 March 2026 by Verso Books in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Verso Fiction' series.

Paperback | 144 pages
197 x 130 x 12 | 132g

As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.

It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.

In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.