The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch

Synopsis

Tomas Olsen Myrbråten has been commissioned by an official Norwegian body to write a report on the country's national monuments and their preservation. Instead, the assignment collapses into scandal. Myrbråten abandons the project, throws his phone and laptop into a ditch, and retreats from the structures of modern life. After meeting Helene in a pub and persuading her to join him in the countryside, his attempt at escape becomes stranger still, eventually driving him deep into the Norwegian wilderness in pursuit of life as a "man of the forest."

The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch is a wild, hallucinatory novel about isolation, technology, language, and the desire to escape civilization. As Myrbråten retreats further into his own mind, Thure Erik Lund asks how much of what we think is truly our own and whether an authentic life is even possible within the systems that shape us. Long celebrated in Norway and considered extraordinarily difficult to translate, this cornerstone of contemporary Norwegian literature appears in English for the first time in David M. Smith's translation.

About the Author

Thure Erik Lund is a Norwegian novelist and essayist known for his formally inventive and uncompromising fiction. He made his literary debut with Tanger in 1992, which won the Tarjei Vesaas' Debutant Prize, and has since published numerous novels and essay collections. His work has received major Norwegian literary honours, including the Norwegian Critics Prize, and he is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Norwegian literature. The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch is translated from the Norwegian by David M. Smith.

Publisher

And Other Stories

Publication Date

October 20, 2026

Format

Paperback

Pages

304

Subjects

Literary Fiction · Fiction in Translation · Norwegian Literature · Experimental Fiction · Absurdist Fiction · Nature & Isolation

ISBN

9781916751712