Previous praise for Will and Testament:

Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Longlisted for The Millions 2020 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction

“Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is writing against repression, against the taboo on telling things as they really are. But he urges us to look at dead bodies; she forces us to regard bleeding souls. Hjorth seems to have formulated from her experiments with living models a model for living, in which exposure—of the self and of others—serves a larger purpose.”

—New Yorker

“The cumulative effect is hypnotic. Hjorth works finely parsed and brilliant variations on her unrelenting theme of familial mistrust and misunderstanding.”

—New York Times

“A powerfully humane novel about inheritance, trauma and the inheritance of trauma.”

—Times Literary Supplement

“Will and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence.”

—Paris Review

“Hjorth’s thoughtful, drily funny, and often devastating novel will leave a deep and lasting impression on readers.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The strength of the novel lies in Bergljot’s convincing and continuing vulnerability, in her mixed feelings and her flaws … A clear-eyed and convincing story of a family’s doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness.”

—Kirkus

“Precise, contemplative, and deeply moving, it’s a masterful unpacking of the tensions, secrets, and bonds that hold a family together.”

—Hannah Williams, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Readers pining for a dose of brooding Norwegian writing in the style of Karl Ove Knausgaard may be drawn to this account of a woman’s struggle to achieve reconciliation with a family that refuses to recognise she was the victim of abuse at the hands of her own father.”

—Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times (“Best Books of 2019: Fiction in Translation”)

“One of the year’s gems in translation was Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund. A story of abuse, inheritance and the battle for the truth among a privileged Norwegian family, it grips like a vice while interrogating national as well as individual self-conception.”

—Guardian (“Best Fiction of 2019”)