Jonas Wergeland, a successful TV documentary producer with a touch of God's gift to women, returns one evening from the World's Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, encompassing by turns a picaresque and endlessly inventive look at the conditions that have brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life. From his hair's breadth escape from a ravenous polar bear while filming in Greenland to a near-death experience aboard a passenger ferry in the icy Baltic, the Tom Jones-like experiences that comprise the narrative of Wergeland's life, relayed in Kjaerstad's veneered and acutely observant prose, provide a fascinating portrait of a media icon at the crux of his journey as an artist.

A professor writing the definitive biography of Jonas Wergeland is unable to process the astonishing volume of contradictory information he unearths—until a mysterious woman appears on his doorstep. Possessing innumerable intimate stories about Jonas, the woman details the dark side of his rise to prominence, and through her stories tries to explain what made him a murderer.

"Jan Kjærstad is a Viking of literature."— Independent The final novel in a trilogy of books about the Norwegian television celebrity Jonas Wergeland, The Discoverer finds Jonas released from prison, having completed his sentence for the death of his wife. He has taken a job as a secretary aboard the Voyager, a ship which is exploring the far reaches of the Sognefjord—the longest fjord in the world. On the ship, Jonas works for a team of young people—including his daughter, Kristin—who are engaged in a multimedia project that is seeking to chart every aspect of the fjord in a new medium that merges text, image, film, and design. While the crew seeks to document the fjord, Jonas is busy exploring his past. For the first time in the trilogy he is allowed to tell his own story, and on board the ship he begins to recreate a manuscript that he wrote in prison, a book which he has already destroyed once, a book which seeks to explore the central mystery at the heart of Jonas' the life and death of his wife Margrete. The Discoverer stands alone as a masterful novel in its own right—multivocal, throwing story after story aloft and examining each from numerous angles, and all at once. Incredibly, it also serves as the perfect complement to The Seducer and The Conqueror, both deepening the mysteries contained in those two novels and revealing the bottomlessness of so many others. Jan Kjærstad once again draws us into the Wergeland universe, and he takes us on a journey that promises to finally discover the truth about Jonas' life, and his wife's death. Jan Kjærstad is the author of the Wergeland Trilogy, a huge international success that led to Kjærstad receiving the Nordic Prize for Literature in 2001. He also received Germany's Henrik Steffen Prize for Scandinavians who have significantly enriched Europe's artistic and intellectual life. Barbara Haveland has translated works by several leading Danish and Norwegian authors, including Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann, and Leif Davidsen.