This captivating tale is set on the tiny island of Barrøy off the coast of Norway, around the beginning of the 20th century. It is inhabited by one family: Hans, his wife Maria, father Martin, sister Barbro and his young daughter Ingrid. The story tracks the adventures of this clan through the years, as they struggle to make a living from their small provisions by way of fishing and farming. There are unexpected births and deaths along the way, and we follow Ingrid's journey from little girl to eventual Queen of the island

This was an unusual choice. I liked the descriptions of the scenes and the characters. It really made me feel like I was an onlooker.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

While I can see the appeal of the Unseen in its beautiful writing and intriguing plot I just couldn't get into it for some reason and after nearly a fortnight of trying a I DFN'd the book at 35%

I didn’t enjoy this at all and this is not my kind of book.

I really enjoyed being immersed in the natural world of The Unseen. Island life off Norway’s coastline back in the 20th Century – though it could almost be anytime – is a delicate balance of resources, humans against animals, crops, the ocean and the weather. The blowing of the wind, the changing of the seasons, the softness of the eider down plucked from the eider ducks that nest beneath their front step, these things have a texture and smell, a visceral life that ensnares the reader.

We follow the family living on Barrøy as the younger generation grows and takes over the running of the island. We see them face the changes of the developing century. We watch Ingrid, the young daughter, move from childhood to adulthood and it is my interest in the continued story, her story, that draws me on but also makes me feel frustrated when I come to the end. I could have read on about this family. I would have been happy to have read generations of island life.

It’s a beautiful, magical novel that feels the ebb and flow of the currents of sea and wind, but it is also a quiet novel, one that leaves you wishing for more. There are secrets and compromises that the land and its people will not ever fully reveal. Barrøy is an island that offers haven and possibility alongside harsh survival making The Unseen a novel laiden with a feeling of myth.

The perfect book to detach yourself from modern hectic life. Put down your phones, pick this up and read it slowly.

(DNF @ 41%) A subtle story of a fishing family carving out a life on a bleak Norwegian island and dreaming of a larger life beyond it. I can’t think of anything particularly negative to say about this; it just failed to hold my interest. I read over 30% while on holiday in Amsterdam – reading it by the coast at Marken felt particularly appropriate – but once we got back I got caught up in other review books and couldn’t get back into it.

Favorite lines: “Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries.”

I found this book surprisingly addictive. The haunting, almost hypnotic, prose had me coming back to follow the harsh life of a family living on a remote Scandinavian island. Nothing much happens but everything happens. Atmosphere by the bucket load.

The Unseen was like reading a Bergman film-heavy doses of atmosphere, a calmness, and a slow pace as Jacobsen shows war time Norwegian island life.

This was a bit of a slow burner to get going, but don't let that put you off. The effort is well worth it. 5 stars.

Truly unusual, a great read with fascinating characters and evocative descriptions of time, place and importantly weather.

This was an interesting story about a family living on one of the many small, islands off the Norwegian coast. It describes the ups and downs and trials and tribulations of this mainly isolated existence and how contact with other communities can develop new ideas. It also shows how one member of the family starts to bring about changes which will improve the lives of them all.

I’m afraid I could not get into this book. I felt a disconnect from the setting and the characters from the first page, and reading it was a struggle.

Despite repeated efforts, just could not get through this book.

This book was very worthy of its shortlisting for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. It is beautifully written and superbly translated from the Norwegian. The inhabitants of the tiny Norwegian island of Barrøy speak in a Norwegian dialect and I loved the way this had been translated, so much so that as I read I felt I was learning the dialect, or is it language of Barrøy, for as has been oft quoted a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, i.e. with power. The inhabitants of Barrøy have very little power and this fact is sometimes made clear when there are linguistic encounters on the mainland. The book is set around the 1930s - 40s (I think) and as the family struggle with the climate and the poverty which informs their daily lives they also begin to be encroached upon by the 20th century and start to make adaptations to their life style, interactions and expectations. For me the book gave a wonderful insight into the harshness of everyday lives on a remote island - this one happened to be Norwegian but could as well have been a Scottish island such as St Kilda or North Rona. To this day there is no landing stage or safe anchorage at North Rona, the impact of which is a theme visited frequently in The Unseen. A wonderful novel which encourages me to read more by the author, Roy Jacobsen.

Plot-free... 1 star
I fear I seem to be abandoning a lot of books recently so perhaps it's as much to do with my reading mood as the books. But really, I don't think it's too much to ask for a book to...

a) Have a plot.

b) Be written grammatically - omitting fullstops doesn't make it stylish nor "stream of consciousness", it just makes it badly written (or badly translated, perhaps).

"He walks towards the little flock, which has stopped and stands there studying the grass, whereafter he shakes hands with each of them in turn, not one of them ventures to look up, not even old Martin, he has removed his red woolly hat, and finally Ingrid who, the priest observes, has clean white hands, not even black fingernails, which have not been bitten down either, but are neatly trimmed, and look at those small dimples where the knuckles will eventually appear."

c) Not use made-up dialects that are tediously annoying - if anyone knows what "hvur bitty" is supposed to mean, do let me know.

As a painstaking description of life in an isolated island in the early 20th century, it's fine - not great, but fine. But (and I ask myself this question about all the over-researched, plotless books that seem to be flooding the fiction market in recent years) is it a novel? And I answer myself "Nope! Not in my opinion." Abandoned at 20% - wouldn't it be ironic if a plot suddenly appears at 21%? But reading other reviews makes me think not, so I'll take the risk...

Probably deserves three stars for the research and descriptions, but since I can't bring myself to read on, then 1 star it is.

Some books you know from page one whether you will love it or not. I loved it.
The prose was brilliant, the plot intricate but clear.
A really engrossing and enjoyable read.

Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, which was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize is an elegant, seductive and touching book on the human desire to always move forward and progress, and the irresistible force of change.

Centred around a single family living on a remote island off the Norwegian cost at the turn of the twentieth century, this book follows the twists and turns of the family’s existence over fifty years. The island is tiny – barely a kilometre in length and width – and it is inhabited only by Hans and Maria, Hans’s elderly father, his sister who has learning difficulties, and their daughter, Ingrid.

This sounds like the start of a sweeping epic but actually this is a very small story of only c.250 pages. Roy’s writing is surprisingly blunt and straightforward. There are no overly descriptive passages or great sections of page-turning seismic events. This is, instead, a surprisingly subtle book that weaves its way into your heart, quietly tugging on your heart strings.

Their lives are ones of hardship. They live close to poverty and often at the mercy of the elements, such as ferocious tides and plunging temperatures that can freeze the water around them. They are also a family viewed with suspicion by their neighbours on the mainland, seen as peculiar and a little odd.

This isn’t a book with seismic events or a whoppingly contrived and pacy narrative drive. Instead, the major events for this family are the actual usual course of events for all of us – births and deaths, unexpected visitors, macro developments in society overall.

This is a book about change and how even if we try to hide ourselves away, change will still come for us. But it’s a book on progress, and the human desire to always strive for better, for more. For Hans may not be orthodox, but he has dreams too. He wants to create an inheritance for his daughter. He wants to leave this islands and its farm in a more fruitful state than when he left it.

But the next generation… Well, they don’t always want what’s left for them. They too have their own desires, their own wants. Indeed, we all do. And as much as this book looks at the bigger picture, it’s also an examination of the sacrifices we all make and the disappointments we all nurse of the way our lives have panned out.

I loved this book. Wonderfully affecting. And the translation from the original Norwegian is superb.

The Unseen is a powerful evocation of the lives of a family living on Barroy, a tiny, remote Norwegian island at the beginning of the last century. Against a background of extreme poverty their lives are harsh and simple, but despite ‘a dark disposition, they are beset not with fear but solemnity.’ There is a sense of time passing very slowly, of lives being lived on the island over hundreds of years; even the location of their house is ‘the product of collective inherited wisdom, built on bitter experience.’ These are the ‘unseen’, the ordinary people.
The family is small: Hans (the father, ‘a human machine’ keen to improve their lives), his sister Barbro (who has learning disability but is a hard worker), his wife Maria (who came from a different island and yearns to go back) and his father Martin, (who is aging and always angry), ‘his great hands resting like empty, immovable shells on his knees.’ Then there is Ingrid, the daughter, a laughing, carefree five year old who develops ‘a strange gravity’ as she becomes a young woman repeating but altering the patterns of her parents. There are occasional visitors but they ‘create a loss’ and those left behind learn ‘the island’s slow lessons in loneliness.’ When Hans arranges for their milk to be collected and sold, the family becomes ‘a name on the map, they are visible.’ But it’s Ingrid who by the end of the novel, makes the family financially secure and, symbolically, paints the house white so that ‘there wasn’t an eye that couldn’t see it.’ The family is no longer ‘unseen’, reflecting the huge changes in ordinary lives that take place during the 20th century.
The island is rarely quiet. We think of The Tempest – ‘the isle is full of noises’ but on Barroy they are not ‘sweet airs that give delight’, they are the sounds of howling winds and the severe storms that batter the island; as well as the constant sound of the sea. When there is silence it is ‘a tiny glimpse of death they have while they are still alive.’
The Unseen is told simply with almost monotonous detail about processes: construction, farming, cutting peat, mending nets and drying fish or collecting down from eider ducks. The translators have invented their own dialect to reflect how the islanders speak to each other: ‘Hva did A tell tha!’ Hard pithy exchanges.
Inner life and introspection are rare – there is too much to do to afford the luxury of ‘self’, and such instances are usually bound up with a sudden appreciation of the beauty of the island, the very fact of being alive. ‘The next day the sea was calm. The sky was blueish black and as lustrous as a luminescent sea.’
Jacobsen’s language, in this fine translation from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw, is spare and plain, echoing hard physical lives pitted against the elements; but it is shot through with a yearning beauty: ‘if you hold a ball of uncarded down in one hand and a ball of carded down in the other you cannot bear the thought of not cleaning it all, it would drive you mad if you didn’t remove the small bits of twig and grass and shell, you would rather die than suffer that.’
By the end of The Unseen, there is an overwhelming sense of the repeating patterns of human existence: people work, have children, then grow old or lose their grip on reality and die; they return to the earth, and become part of the island. Then the cycle begins again. But this is not a depressing novel: the iteration of their unrelenting, daily struggle in this harsh but beautiful environment, ultimately has a cumulative effect which is extraordinarily moving.