The Half Brother

"It is Thursday May the 8th, 1945, and Vera, our mother, is standing deep inside the drying loft in Church Road, unpegging the clothes that have become dry and soft up there in the course of the night. And she laughs quickly as she stretches up to the slack clothes lines which fell rough against her fingers and which can easily sting if she isn't careful. It's Vera, our mother, who stands thus, alone in the drying loft; she laughs and drops the wooden pegs down into the wide pocket of her apron, and carefully places item after item in the woven basket besides her. She is warm and she is thinking of nothing; she's just full to the brim with a great and curious joy, like nothing she has ever known before. Because she feels new now. There has been war for five years and in the summer she'll be twenty; and it's now, right now that her life is beginning..." "The Half Brother is a gripping novel. In its pages we experience the lives of four generations of a far from ordinary family in their Oslo flat. As the heart of the drama we find Fred, the boxer, conceived after the rape of his mother in the drying loft, and his younger brother, Barnum. 'I should have been your father,' Fred tells him, 'instead of that fool who says he is.'"--BOOK JACKET.