Vaim

By: Jon Fosse

Narrated by: Toby Jones

Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing.

Vaim, Jon Fosse's first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange…

©2025 Jon Fosse (P)2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions

Critic reviews

‘We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel prize.’ — Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement ‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’ — Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity ‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’ — Le Monde