Published in 2022 (first published 2018)
176 pages
Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, followed in 2018 by Wait, Blink, which was adapted into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts, and in 2022 by Present Tense Machine. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.
What is this book about?
From the author of Wait, Blink and Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Present Tense Machine is a playful and transcendent novel about language, family, and parallel universes.
On an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1980s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women’s lives, something is not quite right.
Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other’s worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. They are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate–and whether this reality is all there is.
In the exquisite, wistful, slyly profound Present Tense Machine, Gunnhild Øyehaug–called “one of the most exciting writers working today” by the bestselling author Jenny Offill–delivers another dazzling renovation of what fiction can do: a testament to the fact that language shapes the world.
