A word of warning for readers new to Vigdis Hjorth: her books are very bleak. In Is Mother Dead (2022), an artist goads her estranged mother with provocative paintings. If Only (2024) follows the torrid affair between a radio dramatist and a balding Brecht scholar, escalating an unrequited love to its tragicomic extreme. Most notable, however, was Will and Testament (2016), which ignited a scandal in Hjorth’s native Norway as readers questioned whether the book was fictional. Will and Testament tells the story of a woman cutting ties with her family after they refused to believe that her father raped her as a child. That its protagonist and the author share many autobiographical elements – and that Hjorth’s sister wrote a retort in which a woman suffers the fallout from her narcissistic sister’s ‘dishonest memoir’ – probably didn’t help matters.

Repetition, Hjorth’s latest, is an aphoristic account of adolescence. The novel opens with our unnamed narrator, a writer in her sixties, sitting next to a teenage girl at a concert. This prompts her to recall the year she turned sixteen and the diary she kept as an imaginative refuge from