MORMORS UTROLIGE VENNINNER – GRANDMA’S INCREDIBLE FRIENDS
by Trude Teige
AS LONG AS Juni remembers, her grandmother’s girlfriends have spent one summer week every year at her grandparents house on a small Norwegian island: swimming, dancing, laughing. But also whispering in great secrecy. Everything that happened to them during the war and afterwards, these women only ever shared with each other.
BIRGIT IS A nurse in Bodø in Northern Norway during World War II and becomes involved in the resistance. She falls in love with a Russian prisoner of war, but the secret relationship has disastrous consequences.
NADIA IS CAPTURED by the Germans in the Ukrainian countryside and sent to Bodø as a forced laborer. Hundreds of women around Nadia are trying to survive the harsh working conditions and daily sexual assaults of those cold war years. Many children are born in this place of horror. A Norwegian Nazi soldier is the only one who gives her the feeling of having value as a human being until Nadia finds out: she is pregnant.
BIRGIT AND NADIA’S paths cross during these years. Both are friends of Juni’s grandmother, and like her, they hide their stories from the world. When the war is over, the story continues in Bodø, Oslo, Moscow and on the Intelligence Service’s farm in Gudbrandsdalen. GRANDMA’S INCREDIBLE FRIENDS is a story about friendship that makes life worth living despite great trials – a novel about hope, strength and fateful love.
ABOUT THE BOOK
First published by Aschehoug, Norway 2024
RIGHTS SOLD
Norway, Aschehoug
Denmark, Alpha
Germany, S. Fischer
REVIEWS
“Punch and drive! Trude Teige knows how to make the most of her material. The third book in the bestselling Grandma trilogy is both well-written and easy to read. Trude Teige has mastered the entertainment genre to the full. (…) Trude Teige has done a lot of research and jumps into a big drama and unfolds it professionally and effectively …”
Verdens Gang, Norway
“Oozing with drama (…) Author and journalist Trude Teige is good at research. It’s not necessarily news she digs up. But she popularizes the little-known stories of the more than 100,000 foreign prisoners and forced laborers who were held in 500 so-called Russian camps all over Norway, mainly in the north of the country. (…) She is a very effective storyteller, the book is exciting as a thriller. (…) effective entertainment with a clear course for the bestseller lists.”
Dagbladet, Norway
“Teige continues to have a strong female perspective in her historical novels. Teige’s characters are believable and sympathetic, and the reader is quickly drawn into their fates. The language is simple and accessible, which makes the book easy to read despite the heavy themes. This was my first encounter with Trude Teige as an author, and the novel definitely tempts me to read more from her hand.”
Avisa Nordland, Norway
BOOKS
Fiction
