Syngja

A writer addresses his story to a daughter who cannot read it: she cannot read, write or speak, though the best specialists in the country have tried for years to teach her. He goes back to his youth as a bus driver who watched people and wanted to write, to meeting the woman he wanted, and to the birth of their child. Then come the fear and doubt over her inconsolable crying, and the diagnosis of autism. He describes the parents’ struggle to bring her out of her world into theirs, their doubts about the strict behavioural therapy and the experts, and the slow recognition that they must meet her where she is, in the autism.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

231 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Norway

First published

2012 by Forlaget Oktober

Author's age

60 when first published

ISBN

9788249505777 (original)