The Sea Cemetery

The Sea Cemetery

Aslak Nore

Original title: Havets kirkegård
Publisher: Aschehoug , 2021
Genre: Novel
Pages: 486 pages

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The matriarch of a wealthy Norwegian dynasty commits suicide on the family estate. Her unpublished memoirs about the family’s trauma – a wartime ship disaster that killed her husband and hundreds of others – are missing. Her granddaughter embarks on a journey to find the manuscript. Aided by a discredited secret agent with his own motives, they wind up in the family’s labyrinthian past – a dark and dramatic story of secrets, betrayals, and doomed love.

The Sea Cemetery is a literary thriller, a sweeping family saga, and a colurrful drama about power and inheritance inspired by the great tales from the 19th century as well as modern TV series. Distinctly set in Norway and exploring universally human issues, the novel ends in a fateful final voyage along the stunningly scenic Norwegian coast. The quest to uncover the truth 75 years later converges in the shipwreck on the bottom of the sea 300 meters below the surface – where the shocking truth lies buried…

Foreign rights

Czech: Host vydavatelstvi
Danish: Gutkind
Dutch: Harper Collins
English (UK & CW): MacLehose Press (2 book deal)
Finnish: Gummerus (2 book deal)
French: Le bruit du monde (2 book deal)
German: Kiepenheuer & Witsch (2 book deal)
Hebrew: Yedioth Books
Hungarian: Alexandra Publishing House
Icelandic: Storytel Iceland
Italian: Marsilio (3 book deal)
Lithuanian: Obuolys
Portuguese: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
Romanian: Crime Scene
Russian: Corpus Publishing House (2 book deal)
Spanish: Ediciones B (Penguin Random House Spain)
Swedish: Norstedts (2 book deal)

Awards

Mads Wiel Nygaards Endowment (2021), Norway
Nominated for Norwegian Bookseller’s Prize (2021)
Winner of Polarartifice (2023), France
Winner of Mémoires de la mer (2023), France
Nominated for Grand Prix ELLE (2023), France
Nominated for Jan Michalski Prize (2023), Switzerland
Nominated for Prix Relay (2024), France

Take an enormous fortune, a devastating family secret, Machiavellian politics and strong wills in conflict. Add unsuited inheritors, Norwegian special forces and a hint of the Harlequin novel. The result: A lavish crime novel that not even the most critical reader can resist (…) The reading evokes Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, with their portrayal of dark family secrets hidden beneath a weighty layer of tradition and money (…) Aslak Nore has written a smashing crime novel, packed with intriguing characters and with a compelling plot that holds the reader enthralled from the first page to the last.

VG, 6/6 stars

…everything falls into place in Aslak Nore’s novel. It’s like a refined precision product, a lifebuoy for the struggling book market. Moreover, it’s the kind of work both the author and the publisher can be proud of.

Helsingin Sanomat

An impeccably constructed Scandinavian thriller, which, with psychological twists and turns, proves impossible to put down.

Madame Figaro

Aslak Nore

Aslak Nore (b. 1978) grew up in Oslo. He was educated at the University of Oslo and the New School for Social Research in New York and has served in Norway’s elite Telemark Battalion in Bosnia. A modern-day adventurer, Nore has lived in Latin America and worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He has published several non-fiction books and four novels. Wolfsangel (2017) was a national bestseller and won the Riverton Prize for best crime novel in Norway in 2018. The Cemetery of the Sea (2021) is the first novel in an epic literary thriller series and a huge international success and bestseller. Nore lives in Provence, France.

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Other titles by Aslak Nore

Wolfsangel

Aslak Nore

Wolfsangel
2017
The Heirs of the Arctic

Aslak Nore

The Heirs of the Arctic
2023