Vaim Hotel
Vaim Hotel
Jon Fosse
WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
By Nobel Laureate in Literature Jon Fosse, Vaim Hotel continues a triptych of novels set in a remote Norwegian fishing village.
No one knows why The Guest has traveled to Vaim. He checks into the Vaim Hotel, whose only other inhabitant is Brita, the domineering proprietor who swears she’s seen him before and slips into his daily wanderings. As he acquaints himself with village life, The Guest soon learns that Vaim is not like other places. Then things start to vanish: his new fishing pole; his wallet, bag, and car keys. With no way to pay his bill, The Guest must accept that his short trip has become an indefinite stay.
Suffused with dark humor and “mystical realism” (The Guardian), Vaim Hotel—which can be read on its own or as the second of a loose triptych—occupies the intersection of the mundane and uncanny. It’s a mesmerizing tragicomic novel unfolding a world caught between temporal reality and otherworldly implications—where everything is as it's been, and nothing is as it seems.
Praise for VAIM
"Nobel winner Fosse centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway... This is unforgettable."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Fosse’s intrepid, seductive, highly accomplished writing perfectly fits the intricate human truths he seeks to convey.”—Eimear McBride, The Observer
“Vaim floats between states, intermingling life and death, present and past, an interstitial novel about lives that never quite arrive at their culmination.”—Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post
"A mesmerizing little fable about—perhaps—patience, grace and fate...there is much to admire in Fosse’s rhythmic prose, his bursts of humor and heightened sense of life’s pervasive oddness."—Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal
“How can prose that is so simple – cushions are “nice”, work is “trusty” – pulse with such feeling? How can it be so littoral, incarnating the light and spray and tidal tempos of these seascapes with such power? And how can a novelist make a reader feel so lost and so found at the same time? It is strange. A strange miracle.”—The Guardian
“The novel's three movements, beautifully composed, are pattern-like rather than progressive in their exploration of the intersections between lives: Fosse might say 'musical.' Yet their careful measure doesn’t diminish our sense of a shape determined by accidentality... We're entangled in knots of syntax and time, in the utterly riveting banalities that preoccupy people.”—Amit Chaudhuri, The New Statesman
“A breathless line of prose that resists the conventions of contemporary fiction… Thought and feeling, memory and anticipation coexist and collide, suspending action and reflection…making the act of deliberation as consequential as the choice itself.”—“Editor’s Choice,” Leah Dworkin, BOMB
"Immersive, even trance-like. Fosse’s novels enter the strange, conversational cadence of another person’s mind, their personal attunements and idiosyncratic desires... Vaim is as strange and surprising as life itself, drifting away from any expected course."—Bekah Waalkes, The Financial Times
“Exhilarating... In Vaim, we’re carried along in the anxious mutability of drift, wake, current, float.”—Ania Szremski, 4Columns
"Mysterious and playful... the translation by Damion Searls is, as ever, excellently judged in its rhythms and tones."—The Irish Times
“Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience. Vaim is no exception: it ferries the reader along the stream of the ‘ordinary” mind,’ from which suddenly shines forth a luminous beyond.”—Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle
"Three residents of a coastal Norwegian town ponder life, love, and what might’ve been... A fine portrait of uncertainty."—Kirkus Reviews
Product info
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Fiction
Hardcover | 5.25 x 8 | 136 pages
Rights: NA
9798893380804