Novel
Nothing Grows by Moonlight
Av måneskinn gror det ingenting
Torborg Nedreaas · 1947
Synopsis
One spring evening, a man notices a woman alone on a station platform and takes her home; all night long, between drinks and cigarettes, she tells him her life, without either of them being named. In a small mining town, between a sick father and a cold mother, she became attached at seventeen to a teacher, Johannes, who never lets himself be held. That love led her to a clandestine abortion, to poverty and to isolation, under the gaze of a town that judges girls who become pregnant out of wedlock.
Context
The novel appeared in 1947, two years after the author's debut. According to Kjønnsforskning.no, the critics of the day received it as aesthetes and praised its descriptions of nature, before the book came to be associated with the fight for free abortion; the author, a communist at the time, nevertheless said she was defending in it the right of the unborn child. A television film was made from it in 1987. Bibbi Lee translated it into English, reissued by Penguin in 2025.
Who it is for
A long account of a single night, translated into English but not into French, on a subject treated without any softening.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in English in 2025 and in 2026, a novel that has come to be read as a plea for women's right to choose.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.