Back in the Day

Ivor and Marco have been getting high since they were thirteen, started dealing at fourteen, by fifteen they were carrying knives. At sixteen years old, they hurtle from one trip to the next, one fight to the next, always watching their backs. Ivor dreams of getting out - finishing school, becoming a lawyer, marrying the girl he loves from the corner shop - but the path he''s on only leads one way.

In flashes of firecracker prose, shot through with rare empathy, irrepressible wit and gut-punch pathos, Oliver Lovrenski gives voice to young men growing up in a brutal and chaotic world.<>

About the author

Oliver Lovrenski has a Croatian background and he grew up in Norway. His debut novel, Back in the Day, was an instant number-one bestseller when it was published in Norway in 2023. It won the Oslo City Artist Prize, Norwegian Bookseller Prize (making Lovrenski the youngest winner in the prize’s seventy-five-year history) and was shortlisted for the Brage Award and the Tarjei Vesaas Debut Prize. The Norwegian edition is now in its eighth print run. The English translation by Nichola Smalley will be published in hardback in 2025.

Report

Vivid, mordant, fleet-footed . . . A markedly different debut to the millennial ennui that we currently see too often. Oliver Lovrenski is a gifted writer Sunday Telegraph

Product details

• Authors: Oliver Lovrenski
• Assisted by: Nichola Smalley (Translation), Smalley Nichola (Translation)
• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 17.04.2025
• EAN: 9780241705834
• ISBN: 978-0-241-70583-4
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 136 mm x 204 mm x 21 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / Coming of Age, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Political, Norway, Fiction in translation, Narrative theme: Social issues, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Politics, Relating to adolescence / teenage years, Social classes, FICTION / Urban & Street Lit, Drugs and alcohol: social aspects, FICTION / World Literature / Norway, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary