Praise for White Shadow
"Richer, even more provocative ... The heroine of Roy Jacobsen’s White Shadow knows every inch of her home turf, a tiny island off the coast of northern Norway that her people have inhabited for generations. To get a full sense of what it’s like to subsist on Barrøy and how 35-year-old Ingrid comes to be living there alone, it helps to read The Unseen, the first volume in Jacobsen’s trilogy, which has also been translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. But even without that background, the novel’s account of Ingrid’s experience of World War II is unsettlingly easy to follow."
—New York Times
"White Shadow retains many of The Unseen’s pleasures, not least Jacobsen’s clean, spare prose . . . a noble tribute to the human struggle for decency."
—Daniel Marc Janes, Times Literary Supplement
"With every sentence in his new novel, Roy Jacobsen shows how his characters carve their morality out of the dried driftwood found on the small islands of war-ravaged Norway. White Shadow is yet another masterpiece by Jacobsen, who continues in this short novel to track the vicissitudes of the life of his young heroine Ingrid Barrøy ... White Shadow is a powerful psychological novel."
—World Literature Today
"Seldom do we find a protagonist who pushes against her confinement as subtlety and deftly as Ingrid does, and who allows herself, while trapped in circumstances that are beyond her control, to be so open, inquisitive, and even loving. In White Shadow Jacobson offers a portrait of a woman who is single-minded but not rigidly so, purposeful but not devoid of feeling ... The intensity of feeling just beyond the actions described, and the effort itself of forging language to capture their evanescent reality, seems like a literary accomplishment in the family of more overtly “sophisticated” novelists like Thomas Bernhard or W. G. Sebald."
—Book Post
“An unsentimental story that combines the cosmic with bracing emotional austerity.”
—Claire Allfree, Daily Mail
"Disarmingly plainspoken narration brings into sharp relief both individuals and a world in wartime crisis."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A powerful read."
—David Mills, Sunday Times
"A beautifully written and profoundly moving exploration of conflict, love and human endurance."
—St. Catherines Standard
Praise for The Unseen
"Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read."
—Irish Times
"A beautifully crafted novel . . . Quite simply a brilliant piece of work . . . Rendered beautifully into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is a towering achievement that would be a deserved Booker International winner."
—New European
"A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”
—The Guardian
"The subtle translation, with its invented dialect, conveys a timeless, provincial voice . . . The Unseen is a blunt, brilliant book."
—Financial Times
