The Unworthy

by Roy Jacobsen

Genres: Coming of Age; World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Jacobsen can make almost anything catch the light . . . One of Norway's greatest writers on the working class" Times Literary Supplement

In Roy Jacobsen's latest novel, The Unworthy, we follow a gang of boys and girls from an apartment building on the east side of Oslo during the Nazi occupation. They live in poverty, but get by creatively swindling, stealing like magpies, falsifying documents and committing extensive burglaries. They don't shy away from targeting the Enemy, either.

But things become very real when one of the boy's fathers gives him a secret map, with nine locations marked across the city. A few days later, the Quisling police arrive to take the father into custody, from which he returns only in a coffin. And when another of their fathers also disappears, they realise they are involved in something far bigger than any of them could have imagined.

The Unworthy is a brutally frank yet somehow warm portrait of people and places that thus far have been absent from the stories told about World War II. Wise, brutal and entertaining, it is a a gem of a novel written by an author who had his own brushes with the law in his youth.

Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

Release date: July 3, 2025

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288