Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries . . . Ingrid Barrøy is born on an island that bears her name - a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams. Her father dreams of building a quay that will connect them to the mainland, but closer ties to the wider world come at a price. Her mother has her own dreams - more children, a smaller island, a different life - and there is one question Ingrid must never ask her. Island life is hard, a living scratched from the dirt or trawled from the sea, so when Ingrid comes of age, she is sent to the mainland to work for one of the wealthy families on the coast. But Norway too is waking up to a wider world, a modern world that is capricious and can be cruel. Tragedy strikes, and Ingrid must fight to protect the home she thought she had left behind.

The sequel to the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted The Unseen No-one can be alone on an island . . . But Ingrid is alone on Barrøy, the island that bears her name, while the war of her childhood has been replaced by a new more terrible war and Norway is under the Nazi boot. When the bodies from a bombed troopship begin to wash up on the shore, Ingrid cannot know that one will be alive and warm enough to erase a lifetime of loneliness. She cannot know what she will suffer in protecting her lover from the Germans and their Norwegian collaborators, nor the journey she will face, wrenched from her island once more, to return home. Or that, amid the suffering of war, among refugees fleeing famine and scorched-earth retreats, she will be given a gift whose value is beyond measure.

The third novel in a historical trilogy that began with the International Booker shortlisted The Unseen The journey had taken on its own momentum, it had become an autonomous, independent entity, she was searching for love, and was still happily unaware that truth is the first casualty of peace. The long war is over, and Ingrid Barroy leaves the island that bears her name to search for the father of her child. Alexander, the Russian captive who survived the sinking of prisoner ship the Rigel and found himself in Ingrid's arms, made an attempt to cross the mountains to Sweden. Ingrid will follow in his footsteps, carrying her babe in arms, the child's dark eyes the only proof that she ever knew him. Along the way, Ingrid's will encounter collaborators, partisans, refugees, deserters, slaves and sinners, in a country that still bears the scars of defeat and occupation. And before her journey's end she will be forced to ask herself how well she knows the man she is risking everything to find. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

The fourth novel in a historical series that began with the International Booker-shortlisted The Unseen "Taken together, Jacobsen has given us an epic of Norway's experience of the first half of the 20th century that is subtle and moving" David Mills, Sunday Times "Jacobsen can make almost anything catch the light . . . One of Norway's greatest writers on the working class" Times Literary Supplement A childless island is no island at all. Ingrid Marie Barrøy has returned to the island that bears her name, bringing up her daughter with the other children that came with the war, who will someday raise their own children until an island that was empty is singing once more with life. And soon another will arrive, a child of the war and an orphan of the peace, whom Ingrid will fight to make her own, and whose interests may, in time, collide with those of certain others on the island, forcing her to make a choice she will long regret. The sea brings the island all it has - herring for salting, eider ducks for down - but Ingrid knows, has always known, that one day it may wish to take something back. But until that day, she continues to live by one simple truth: There is no limit to what you can do with an island, the imagination sets the only limits, as with the sea.