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A chilling tale about the danger of good intentions - from the acclaimed author of the Inspector Sejer seriesA woman wakes one night to find that a strange man has walked into her bedroom. She lies there in terrified silence unable to move. The woman is an author and the man one of her prospective characters. So desperate is he to have his story told that he has resorted to breaking in to her house to make her tell it.She creates Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, who works in an art gallery. He lives a quiet, dutiful life, carefully designed to avoid surprise. One winter's day all this begins to change, when an emaciated young heroin addict walks into the gallery. A kind man, Alvar gives her a cup of coffee to warm her up. She returns some weeks later to his place of work, and then one day appears on his doorstep demanding to be let in.Interspersed with the chapters of Alvar's story are his encounters with its author - the frantic attempts of a fictional man trying to control his own destiny. Broken is a gripping novel about the boundary between fact and fiction from the renowned author of the Inspector Sejer mysteries.
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Stopped reading at 4/5. Interesting experiment, small book. Chapters of the story mixed with discussions between writer and protagonist. Some of those discussions offer some insight in the process of thinking up the story, but they are so few and unremarkable that as an editor I would have cut those chapters.
I liked the protagonist - and his thoughts - and the way the story unfolded, up until where the disaster starts to unfold. The relationship between the 2 main characters was the center of the book: once that ended I lost all interest in the last bit, especially since it then changes over to a whole ‘nother genre. From a psychological novel to a crime story.
Anyway. I like Fossum a lot and this book shows she can write in other genres, too.