Blog Tour: The Guests – Agnes Ravatn, translated by Rosie Hedger

It started with a lie…

Married couple Karin and Kai are looking for a pleasant escape from their busy lives, and reluctantly accept an offer to stay in a luxurious holiday home in the Norwegian fjords.

Instead of finding a relaxing retreat, however, their trip becomes a reminder of everything lacking in their own lives, and in a less­than-friendly meeting with their new neighbours, Karin tells a little white lie…

Against the backdrop of the glistening water and within the claustrophobic walls of the ultra-modern house, Karin’s insecurities blossom, and her lie grows ever bigger, entangling her and her husband in a nightmare spiral of deceits with absolutely no means of escape…

Agnes Ravatn is a Norwegian author and columnist. She made her literary début with the novel Week 53 in 2007. Since then she has written a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning essay collections, including Standing, Popular Reading and Operation Self-discipline, in which she recounts her experience with social-media addiction.

Her debut thriller, The Bird Tribunal, won the cultural radio P2’s listener’s prize in addition to The Youth’s Critic’s Prize, and was made into a successful play in Oslo in 2015. The English translation, published by Orenda Books in 2016, was a WHSmith Fresh Talent Pick, winner of a PEN Translation Award, a BBC Radio Four ‘Book at Bedtime’ and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Critically acclaimed The Seven Doors was published in 2020.

Agnes lives with her family in the Norwegian countryside.

My thoughts: a perfect example of why you shouldn’t tell lies, as Karin’s spiral out of control and she ends up with serious egg on her face.

Staying in an old school friend’s holiday cabin on the coast, an old school friend she can’t stand and is still seriously jealous of, she has an awkward encounter with the neighbours. Instead of introducing themselves as guests, she tells the neighbour, a novelist she recognised, that they own the cabin and then starts to expand. A dinner invitation means that she, and husband Kai, have to keep lying.

Or they could come clean. But as the two writers next door never mention that they know the cabin’s owners, Karin assumes they’re in the clear, that her lies about being an entrepreneur and an investment banker are working, when actually their real jobs in the planning office and as a joiner, would have been of more interest to the neighbours.

The ending made me laugh out loud – never tell unnecessary lies, you end up looking very, very foolish.

A great fun read, full of humour and clever little moments.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.