The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

Lars Mytting

Maclehose Press Quercus, 2017 - Fiction - 403 pages

By Norway's bestselling novelist and the author of NORWEGIAN WOOD, a family story of epic scale.

Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents, when he was three years old, has always been shrouded in mystery - he has never been told how or where it took place and has only a distant memory of his mother.

But he knows that the fate of his grandfather's brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with this mystery. One day a coffin is delivered for his grandfather long before his death - a meticulous, beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps Einar is not dead after all.

Edvard's desperate quest to unlock the family's tragic secrets takes him on a long journey - from Norway to the Shetlands, and to the battlefields of France - to the discovery of a very unusual inheritance. The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is about the love of wood and finding your own self, a beautifully intricate and moving tale that spans an entire century.

Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Russell Garrett

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - traumleben - LibraryThing

An entrancing novel that follows a young man's journey into the mysterious circumstances of his parent's deaths, which left him a young orphan, to be raised by his Norwegian grandfather. Rooted in the ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - CharlotteBurt - LibraryThing

It is at heart a mystery novel where Edvard attempts to find the truth about his parents death following a trail of clues to the Shetland Islands and then to battlefields from world war one in ...

About the author

Lars Mytting, a novelist and journalist, was born in Favang, Norway, in 1968. His novel Svom med dem som drukner (to be published in English as The Sixteen Trees of the Somme) was awarded the Norwegian National Booksellers' Award and has been bought for film. Norwegian Wood has become an international bestseller, and was the Bookseller Industry Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2016.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Sixteen Trees of the Somme
• Author: Lars Mytting
• Translated by: Paul Russell Garrett
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Maclehose Press Quercus, 2017
• ISBN: 0857056034, 9780857056030
• Length: 403 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical