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Vilgot, eleven, knows the three great dangers adults warn about: swimming right after eating, plastic bags, and strangers who stop their cars by the road. On a dark winter afternoon in the 1960s he is on his way to a friend when something happens that marks him for good. More than thirty years later an elephant collapses from exhaustion on one of the roads leading out of Oslo, and the grown Vilgot is the only one who knows where it came from: he has been keeping it captive. The novel travels between the brittle innocence of 1960s Norway and the present, between the magic of the circus ring and a very real animal, exploring friendship possible and impossible, loneliness, and a numbing kind of love and longing.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

259 pages in the original

Genres

Coming of age (assigned by AI)

Set in

Norway, 1960s–2000s

First published

2002 by Oktober

Author's age

45 when first published

ISBN

9788249500789 (original)