The ‘greatest Norwegian contemporary writer’ (Knausgård) finally in English: An exhilarating, hallucinatory exploration of language, isolation, and the search for an authentic life.

Deep in the Norwegian wilderness, Tomas Olsen Myrbråten is a man at war with the modern world. After a bureaucratic cultural assignment spirals into a public scandal and his desperate flight, Tomas attempts to shed civilisation to become a ‘man of the forest’. Long acclaimed in Norway, but considered untranslatable, Thure Erik Lund is now available in English for the first time in David M. Smith's radically brilliant translation. The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch is a profound, hallucinatory exploration of language and isolation, particularly about how we make a language our own, how we distinguish our own thoughts from those that have been fed into us. This cornerstone of contemporary Norwegian literature is an exhilarating journey into the dark heart of the life of the mind.