You Are My Story

Trine-Lise Rygh

Original title: Du er min historie
Publisher: Vigmostad & Bjørke, 2022
Genre: Novel
Pages: 207 pages

You Are My Story is a nuanced novel about a couple’s marital challenges. The female protagonist of this novel is in a relationship that has gradually come apart at the seams. Her husband is depressed; he has always been so, living a bit to one side of everyone else. He leaves, disappearing down the road leading away from the house where they had hoped to find happiness. Sometimes he seeks out other partners.

You Are My Story describes a year in their marriage and gives us glimpses of the couple’s common history through condensed flashbacks. The perceptive, beautiful, and painful story is evoked through a strong and pronounced literary voice.

Sensational (…) You Are My Story is a self-assured and stylistically cogent novel in the genre of soft realism, written in a suitably down-to-earth literary voice. 6 stars Joakim Tjøstheim, Dagbladet

Painful, beautiful, and well-written about shouldering a heavy burden of care for another … 5 stars Sigmund Jensen, Stavanger Aftenblad

A novel about married life written in an enchanting literary idiom. (…) Every now and then words fall short when seeking to describe a literary masterpiece. This is definitely one of them. 6 stars Kjell Magne Gjøsæter, bokblogger.com

Foreign rights

Greece: GEMA Publishers
Macedonia: Ikona

You are my Story is my absolute favorite this year. A complex, yet vulnerable and intimate, precise literary prose, unsentimental, yes, everything powerful literature must have. It is about far more than ‘depression’.

author Bjørn Sortland

Knigoteka Ikona is proud to present You Are My Story by Trine-Lise Rygh, a subtle and deeply human tale about the way we live our lives. This is a contemporary story about half-conscious living, which only later — through reflection on memories — becomes fully awakened. Or perhaps, by recalling past scenes, everything gains a completely new meaning. It is the way we move through time: each return to the past forces us either to relive our wounds or to mend them, as best as we can.

The woman whose story we follow is a heroine who could bear both your name and mine — a woman who resembles each of us, every woman in our surroundings. Family bonds are as fragile as our mental and emotional states.
You Are My Story is a book that will make you pause and reflect — on your own choices and on the quiet stories we all carry and silently live with every day.

Knigoteka Ikona, Macedonia

Trine-Lise Rygh

Trine-Lise Rygh (born in 1974) lives in Kolsås. She has a bachelor’s degree in Dissemination of Literature from UIO and has written articles for Harvestmagazine.no and other publications. She was awarded the Norwegian National Association for Language Consolidation’s (Landslaget for språklig samling) literary prize for her debut novel Hundedager (Dog Days, 2020).