The Unworthy

“Jacobsen can make almost anything catch the light . . . One of Norway’s greatest writers on the working class” Times Literary Supplement

They’re a gang without a name – Olav, Carl, Roar, Jan and Vidar – teenage boys growing up in a working-class area of Oslo under the shadow of Nazi occupation. They live in poverty but earn a crust by creatively swindling their fellow citizens, falsifying documents and stealing like magpies. And they don’t shy away from targeting the Enemy, either.

But everything changes when Carl’s father hands him a secret map and a German password, just hours before he’s taken away by the Quisling police – only to return in a coffin. And when Olav’s father also disappears, the gang come to see that they are caught up in something far more serious than their usual petty crimes.

Taking in love, death, betrayal and tragedy,  The Unworthy is the latest masterpiece from Roy Jacobsen, author of the International Booker-shortlisted The Unseen. It shines a light on a brutal aspect of the war rarely explored in fiction, and every sentence is imbued with decades of accumulated wisdom from a writer who had his own brushes with the law in his youth.

Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw