Septology Signed & Numbered Indie Exclusive Edition

Septology is published here as a limited edition casebound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
The First Decade Collection is a hardback limited edition series featuring ten important books from Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first decade of publishing. Designed by art director Ray O’Meara, each book is casebound in fine linen cloth with custom marbled endpapers and signed and numbered book plates, with a run of 1000 copies each.
The First Decade Collection reflects the breadth of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ contemporary publishing, which focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language, and marks a decade of publishing. The 2015, 2018, 2022 and 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse are all included in the series, out on 24 October 2024.

What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. Jon Fosse’s Septology is a transcendent ex- ploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’ - Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity.

‘Septology feels momentous.’ - Catherine Taylor, Guardian.

‘I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’ - Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books.

‘Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Septology, an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided...read more...