1 First Band on the Moon, 2 Life, 3 Gran Turismo, 4 Long Gone Before Daylight
JOHAN HARSTAD, winner of the 2008 Brage Award (previously won by Per Petterson), is a Norwegian author, playwright, graphic designer, drummer, and international sensation, with books published in eleven countries. His first novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion?, was in 2009 made into a TV series starring The Wire’s Chad Coleman. Harstad lives in Oslo. DEBORAH DAWKIN is a literary translator based in London.
"This paradoxical desire to be seen without being heralded sets
Harstad's hero apart from other tormented young men of contemporary
literature . . . [an] ambitious debut." —Publisher's Weekly
"The austere landscape and people of the Faeroes become players in
Harstad’s poetic narrative, half-dramatic and half-comic, which
takes on memorable turns with every page as Mattias realizes just
how not in control of his destiny he really is. A modern saga
of rocketships, ice floes and dreams of the Caribbean, and great
fun to read." —Kirkus Reviews
"Like Jonathan Safran Foer, Harstad combines formal play and
linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness." —Dedi
Felman, Words Without Borders
"The fact is that Johan Harstad has a wholly unique voice,
simultaneously both concrete and soaring . . . to be able to write
in this way, to conjure a situation and construct space and time
around it with such linguistic fluency, cannot be learned. You are
born with it. Harstad’s fellow countryman Knut Hamsun, who was able
to do the same, must be rejoicing in his heaven or wherever he
might be." —Jakob Levinsen, Jyllands-Posten review
"It doesn’t always have to be crime novels that come from
Scandinavia. What 27 year-old Johan Harstad has written is quite
plainly a work of genius. Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All
the Confusion? is as poetic as it is alive." —Bucherwelt review
“In a voice and vision that alternately channels Ignatius J.
Reilly, Holden Caulfield, Dave Eggers, and the Little Prince,
Mattias unwraps his psyche while unwrapping an unknown landscape …
Harstad's language is rife with trickery, pop-culture, and formal
derring-do. It's as if, with every crafted word and considered
detail, Harstad is announcing, pleading: Trust me folks, there is
more to this place than Stieg Larsson.” –Cleveland Plain
Dealer
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