Torborg Nedreaas (1906–87) is the first female Norwegian author to have her work reissued as a Penguin Classic. She began her career writing short stories (under a pseudonym) for mass-market women’s magazines to help her provide for her young family during the war. She later distanced herself from the genre. In 1947, the year in which she published Nothing Grows by Moonlight, her best-known novel, she wrote an article supporting a proposed national ban on ‘trivial’ literature, arguing that it has nothing ‘to do with reality’ and ‘clouds the mind’. Reading Nothing Grows by Moonlight, one is struck less by how far removed the book is from where she started off than by how this apprenticeship honed her storytelling skills.

From the outset, the story moves. A man has a chance encounter with an enigmatic woman in the railway station in a modernist-looking city. She seems young and old at the same time – she has a furrow in her forehead and a tie around her neck, as if partly in school uniform. They walk around aimlessly for a while, then end up outside his apartment. She needs a drink; he has aquavit to spare. Before even taking off her coat, she starts examining his bookcase, picking out Boccaccio’s Decameron. ‘I liked it when I was young,’ she says. It turns out that she has tragic love stories of her own to share.

Most of her tales date from her teenage years (she is now thirty-eight). She grew up in a poor town on the western coast of Norway invariably referred to as The Mine, after its main employer. ‘You have no idea what it’s like at The Mine,’ she tells the man