The acclaimed Norwegian author explores the impact of childhood trauma in this portrait of a life lived in fear

Stay With Me is a brief novel, but the whole is overshadowed by fear. The narrator, a Norwegian novelist living in Milan, recalls her childhood in the book’s opening pages, the constant threat of her father’s violence, its eruptions the more fearsome for being random, unpredictable. “The world was hard. Wrong was wrong. When it could have been right. Afraid was a state of being. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn’t be shed.”

Hanne Ørstavik’s novel addresses the question of whether a fear that springs from such a deep well can ever be shed. The nameless narrator is a widow; a year earlier her husband, an Italian musician referred to as L, died far too young. She is not free of her grief, but she meets M, who at 35 is 17 years younger than she is, and embarks on an affair. He is removed from her world of music and literature and gallery openings; his ambition is to own a Land Rover Defender. The contrast frees her from herself to a certain extent, and what’s not to like about hot sex with a younger man? But she questions his desire for her and she comes to fear the rage that can erupt from him, an echo of what she witnessed as a little girl.