Alice in Suburbia

Inger Bråtveit

Original title: Alice A4
Publisher: Forlaget Oktober, 2015
Pages: 237 pages

Alice in Suburbia shows through language and content that falling in love has its own, absurd logic and that the ways of love are inscrutable. Bråtveit writes with intensity about gender, class, power and rage.

Alice lives in a block of flats in a suburb with her mother and sister. She yearns to escape from her roots, which she feels are holding her back from all her longings. She meets someone she believes can take her to another world, and together they drive the Autobahn in search for Wonderland.

Alice in Suburbia unfolds in a creative, mythological and illogical dialogue with Lewis Caroll’s children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865.) In Bråtveit’s novel, Alice is a young girl on the threshold of adulthood. Alice hopes and believes she found her first, great love, only to lose it and find herself again. As Alice grows older, she fights, with fierce determination, to free herself from this love. Only to find herself, once again, imprisoned within her illusion of liberation.

“Important literature … Important, painful and successful urban legend …

Vårt Land

“Bråtveit consequently aims her work at hybrid forms …Bråtveit has written a poetic, intelligent and style-wise interesting novel.

Klassekampen

“Bråtveit writes a kind of imagery prose that abide by different rules than the chronological story … both very open and rich in contact points

Morgenbladet

Inger Bråtveit

Photo: Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard

Inger Bråtveit is one of Norway’s most exciting younger authors and the recipient of several awards and grants, including the New Norwegian Literature Prize and the Bjørnson Scholarship. She debuted as an author in 2002 with the novel Mouth Towards a Frozen Fjord. Her second novel, Siss and Unn, was nominated for the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 2008.
Bråtveit published her third novel Alice A4 in 2015, nominated for the Young Readers’ Critics’ Prize. The Art of Swimming (2018) is a hybrid novel applauded for its wise and beautiful prose. Starweed is her fifth novel.