UNDIS BREKKE

The Dinner Party is about 37-year-old Undis Brekke who returns to the farming community she grew up in, in order to teach Norwegian at the local college, even though she is thoroughly fed up with students. She arrives just in time for the annual Christmas dinner at the faculty for Nordic studies, where she is forced to confront various scraps and pieces of her own childhood and adolescence that she has attempted to sweep under the carpet. Betrayal, hope and anxiety, writer’s block, male and female exes, pre-menstrual syndrome, childhood friends and parents are all potent ingredients in this portrait of a woman who is struggling to keep her head above water. How can you defend your own values, how can you see your own retina, how can you approach your own mother and how can you eat a whole, charcoaled sheep’s head … the novel addresses all these issues. Foreign Sales: Denmark, Gyldendal Praise 'a real pageturner about longing and self-deception - brilliantly written with lots of black