A jewel of modern Norwegian literature now hailed as Lars Saabye Christensen's crowning achievement - an intricate and utterly compelling narrative. Christensen is one of Scandinavia's finest and most celebrated storytellers, who has devoted the best part of his career to writing about the city of his birth. As Oslo slowly emerges from a period of crippling austerity, Echoes of the City shows how small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and compassion, and tiny shifts in fortune, can change the lives of many. At the centre of the novel are Maj and Ewald Kristoffersen and their son Jesper, their lives closely entwined and overlapping with their neighbours' on Kirkeveien. When the butcher's son Jostein is knocked down in a traffic accident and loses his hearing, Jesper promises to be his ears in the world. The arrival of a long-awaited telephone is a major event for Maj and Ewald, and meanwhile their neighbour, recently widowed Fru Vik, tentatively takes up with the owner of the bookshop near the cemetery. The bar at Hotel Bristol becomes a meeting place for all of them - for Ewald and his advertising colleagues, for Fru Vik and her suitor, to the piano playing of hapless Enzo Zanetti, an immigrant down on his luck, who enables Jesper to discover his true passion. The minutes of the local Red Cross meetings give an architecture to the narrative of so many lives and tell a story in themselves, bearing witness to the steady recovery of the community. Echoes of the City is a remarkably tender observation of the rhythms and passions of a city, and a particular salute to the resilience of its women.

Part Two of the Echoes of the City series, set in post-war Oslo, by an author who understands the city like no other. In Kirkeveien, Oslo, in the year 1956, forty-year-old Maj is worn down by being a homemaker and widowed mother. To the indignation of the Red Cross ladies, she cautiously frees herself from the role she has otherwise fulfilled to the letter. She finds a job that she turns out to be more than good at, and some kind of love, too. Her friend Margrethe is sick of her marriage to the antiquarian bookseller, Olaf Hall, but cannot think of divorce. Jesper gets a girlfriend who opens the door to a new, more liberated environment of vegetarianism and politics. And his best friend Jostein realises that his talent for making money will allow him access to a world that is larger and richer than that of the Oslo slaughterhouse. Friendship is a beautifully orchestrated story about people and their dreams, about social conventions, personal constraints and what it takes to have the courage to realise oneself. In this book brimming with human insight, as in Echoes of the City, in each of these characters we recognise something of ourselves. "One of Norway's finest writers" GUARDIAN "Profoundly resonant" TLS

Tredje bind begynder i 1968. Der er opbrud og værdiskred på alle fronter. Majs datter, Stine, er nu en ung kvinde, der flirter med marxisme og maoisme og for en tid opgiver sine medicinstudier for at blive flyttemand! Jostein er dog stadig overbevist forretningsmand, nu forhandler han marcipan fra Lübeck og ser også sådan ud. Men så pludselig sker der noget. Trude, Jespers kæreste, modtager et postkort med et motiv fra Como-søen fra Jesper, der har været forsvundet i flere år. Men hvor er Jesper, og hvad er der sket? I Byens spor 3 samles alle trådene fra de to foregående romaner. Det særlige ved romanen er et stærkt autofiktivt spor, hvor forfatteren LSC træder tydeligt frem og fortæller historien om sin kræftdiagnose- og behandling, og kommenterer sin egen skriveproces.

I fjerde og sidste bind af Byens spor, Lars Saabye Christensenspopulære romanserie om Oslo, er vi nået til 1980’erne. Tiderne harændret sig, og Oslo ligesådan. Jesper lever sammen med sin ungdomskæreste Trude,men forholdet går dårligt, og heller ikke jobbet som klaverlærer bringer hamnogen særlig glæde. Jespers ven, den driftige Jostein, har kørt reklamebureauetDek-Rek i sænk ved sine vilde ideer. Flere af romanens personer befinder sigsåledes et sted i livet, som kalder på forandring. Men hvilken og hvordan?