The Ferryman and His Wife

by Frode Grytten

Genres: Literary Fiction; Visionary & Metaphysical

Synopsis

In the spirit of Amor Towles and George Saunders, the renowned, bestselling Norwegian author Frode Grytten takes readers on a quietly epic journey: ferry driver Nils Vik’s last route along the fjord, on what he knows will be his last day alive.
 
Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and knows it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine as voices from his past echo in his mind, and looks around the empty house one last time, before stepping onto his beloved boat.
 
His dog, dead these many years, leaps aboard with him, and then the other dead begin to emerge – from the woods along the fjord, from each of the ferry stops along the route, from his logbook full of memories and quotations and jotted-down notes about the weather conditions. The people from the past accompany him now, prodding him, showing him what he might have missed before, as he waits for his Marta, his late, remarkable wife, to finally join him on the boat again.
 
Winner of the prestigious Brage Prize, and considered to be Grytten’s long-awaited masterpiece, The Ferryman and His Wife is the story of a quiet, yet utterly profound, life told in reverse. Timeless and absorbing, this is a novel about what we take with us – those moments that might seem insignificant as they happen but prove to be the most meaningful, in the end.

 

Release date: November 18, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 160

Sample

AT A QUARTER PAST FIVE in the morning Nils Vik opened his eyes, and the last day of his life began. He lay there somewhere between dreaming and waking, sure that he would slip back into sleep, as was his habit. But now the day was here. He turned over, becoming aware of the room, the clock radio, the cold drifting in through the open window. There were no bloodstains on the pillow today, as far as he could see. What had he been dreaming about? A hand through his hair, fingertips brushing his cheek, a voice that reached him through the darkness. I’ll wait for you downstairs, sweetheart.

He set his feet on the cold floor, went into the bathroom, pulled down his pyjama bottoms and emptied himself of the weight of the night’s piss, which poured into the toilet bowl in a single, long sigh. He began to do what had to be done. He was still capable of performing his morning ritual with efficient movements: get himself upright, find clothes, make coffee, eat breakfast, go down to the boat whatever the weather. These movements, drilled into him over the course of a long life.

In the shower he watched the water as it gushed over his pale skin. At the sink he dragged his razor across his cheeks and jaw, down his throat and over his Adam’s apple. His right hand was trembling slightly – he had to be careful. He didn’t want to cross the fjord with a plaster on his upper lip or a bloody scrap of toilet paper stuck to his chin. What else? Teeth? Hands? Pomade? He considered omitting the aftershave. But this day couldn’t be any different to yesterday, or the day before that, or any other day before that one.

The man in the mirror. A man of medium height, stocky and strong; hair once dark but now streaked with grey. A deeply furrowed face, high forehead, narrow eyes, brows that could do with a trim. Gravity had played its part; he would often joke that only his feet still looked like their full and true selves. He held his own gaze. The man in the mirror stared back at him, lowered his arms, attempted a smile. He was a man who liked to know everything about what went on around him: the weather, the wind, the tides. He was now looking at a man who no longer knew where he was going.

A stream of voices came rushing through the air and up the stairs. Nils made his way down to the kitchen, where one of the chairs caught his attention. There was a small indentation in the seat cushion, a depression he couldn’t remember having seen before, as if someone had broken in during the night and was now waiting for him. Otherwise, everything appeared as it always did. The humming of the refrigerator, the dirty plates in the sink.

A voice was prattling on, somewhere in the house. Nils turned, and followed the sound. The transistor radio stood in the hallway, he must have left it there with the volume turned up late last night. He took the radio back into the kitchen with him. What day was it? A peaceful, rainy day in November. The voice on the radio reported that the weather would clear up later, there might even be some sunshine. A deer had fallen onto a speeding car beside the fjord. A missing boy had been found by the police in the city. A fire had broken out aboard a ferry.

Nils made coffee, poured himself a cup and stirred in two lumps of sugar. Still sleepy, he spread a slice of bread with syrup, but then sat there frowning at it. His stomach trouble meant that every meal now felt tedious and pointless. He stared into the living room as he chewed and swallowed each bite of bread, aided by small sips of the coffee. The old furniture was heavy and dark, as if it would stand here for all time. Three generations had passed through these rooms, fluttering around like insects, filling each floor with the sounds of life and joy.

They were still on the walls and in the frames on the dresser, these photographs from baptisms and confirmations, weddings and other days that had passed before this last one. He had lived his whole life here, first with his mother, father and brother, later with his wife and two daughters. He didn’t know what would happen to the house after he was gone. He had spoken to Eli and Guro during the summer, had sat them down at the kitchen table and told them they’d have to agree on who would have what. He wanted no arguments about their childhood home after he was gone – he had seen far too many siblings exchange their parting words at a parent’s funeral. His daughters had laughed it off. They had joked and smirked, but they had promised there would be no arguing.

Nils turned, reached for the kitchen drawer and took out a pen and a postcard. The card featured an image of the fjord on a summer’s day, with sunshine and fine white clouds above the mountains. In an unsteady hand, he wrote a brief greeting across the sky, then propped the card against his coffee cup. What would the girls think when they found it? Would they smile? Would they cry? I have left this house, and I won’t be coming back. Take good care of each other. Dad.

After listening to the news at six-thirty, he stood and said thanks for his meal. He had continued to do this even after his wife had died. Thank you, Marta, he said, and looked over at the kitchen chair that had once been hers. When she was alive, she would lean across the table after they had finished eating, place her hand over the back of his, give it a gentle rub and say, You’re welcome.

He went outside to pick up the newspaper. His last newspaper. It was limp from lying out in the rain. Rescued alive after an hour in the deep, read the front-page headline. There was also an image of a footballer under the heading: Dream Debut. Should he sit down to read it? No, this last newspaper would remain unread. He went down into the cellar and set it atop one of the many piles. This was how it had to be, he had to do this right, make sure even the very last newspaper was in its proper place. People were surprised if they accompanied him down to the cellar and saw the bundles of newspapers there. All those days, all those years, all the lost time stacked here, all the way back to when he’d been given the job. He was once the man who delivered the newspaper to people along the fjord; he had brought them wars, fires, murders, weather forecasts, election results, football results, special offers on cars and suits and televisions.

We can’t have the cellar so full of the past, Marta had said.

Can’t we?

No. And anyway, it’s a fire hazard.

Such is life, Marta.

She didn’t say it out loud, but Nils knew that Marta longed to get rid of the newspapers that landed on every chair and rug and tabletop before they eventually fluttered down to the cellar. She didn’t care for the printer’s ink that marked their tablecloths and clothes; she said that even the living-room wallpaper had been dirtied by it. Nils had replied that it would have been lovely had the pattern on the wall been created by the great and small happenings out there in the world, but he was sure the marks were from his hair oil. If he was especially tired after a night out on the fjord, he might lean against the wall beside the door and sleep standing up, the way horses do. They had tried to remove the marks, but all the washing had only made them worse; they expanded, like maps of an unknown continent.

Nils considered whether there was more to be done in the house. Were there things he should take with him? What do you take with you when you know you’re not coming back? He took the Omega from the corner cabinet and saw that its hands had stopped a little after ten o’clock on the nineteenth of some forgotten month. He wound up the watch and set the time. A quarter to seven? The eighteenth of November? The nineteenth? No, the eighteenth, of course. The watch had been a gift from Marta on their silver wedding anniversary. She had spent a lot of money on it, and she’d been hurt when he had continued to wear his old one every day. He had explained that he didn’t want to scratch the glass; his work didn’t permit him to wear such a nice watch.

He went back up to the bedroom, stripped the bed and heaped all the bedding into a loose pile. Then he lifted the mattress out of its frame and jostled the ancient thing over to the landing. He wrestled the mattress down the stairs and through the hallway before he put on his shoes, managed to open the front door, and shoved the mattress out onto the gravel. He had matches and paraffin at the ready, and he dragged the mattress a short distance from the wall of the house before he set it alight. Every six months, he and Marta had carried the old mattress out into the garden to remove the smell of sleep from it and breathe new life into its tired, worn fibres. When they put the mattress back in the frame, they made sure to always turn it over, so they would spend six months lying on each of its sides.

The mattress smouldered for a while before the flames took hold of its stained surfaces. Nils Vik stared at the dark rings of blood, yellow blooms of urine, breastmilk stains and decades of semen and sweat, fragments of skin and hair and nails, traces of jam and coffee and breakfasts in bed every birthday, hopes and joys he had forgotten and which would now go up in smoke. He even thought he glimpsed the imprint of her body, where she had lain like an S on her side of the bed, but it must have been his imagination. The mattress told the story of an entire life. It felt too private to allow other people – and even complete strangers, for all he knew – to deal with their past. Nils went back up the front steps, and turned to see the mattress ablaze on the gravel.

A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN, Nils Vik walked through the house for the last time. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet; the handrail on the stairs felt cool against his palm. He put on a wool sweater, found his peacoat, picked up his cigarettes and took his skipper’s cap from the hook. He rummaged through his pockets for his keys, and eventually found them.

He went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. This was a habit he had acquired – the journey was always better, he felt, if he sat for a while before heading out. If he simply sat there, in the peace and quiet. Thinking things through. Clearing his head. This morning he was afraid he might remain sitting there, that he would lose the motivation to go down to the boat. He was ready to leave; he wanted to stay. He stood, and his heart began to pound. The last time he had been to see the doctor, he’d been told that his heart was impaired. In a serious voice, the doctor had said he was worried about Nils’s heart. What a farce, to spend all that time on a diagnosis Nils himself could have made instantly.

He stood outside on the front steps for a moment. From the house he could hear whispering and sighing, the low voices, the arguments, the radio with its fishing report. The footsteps and the humming, the flushing of the toilet. Marta playing cards with the girls, the gurgling . . .