Their leader is a being who is known as the little one, and they attack people they do not like. They arrive without warning, vanish without a trace, and leave nothing but fear in their wake. But there is someone who might be able to lessen the suffering; a ten-year-old stand-up comedian, who sacrifices himself to laughter on a stage in Oslo.

In Please, the stories of the victim, the attacker and witness are told. The novel investigates what happens when the security we take for granted disappears. In this devastating tale, life seems as distant as a dream yet chillingly real.

Praise for Please:

“Torgersen writes brutally about fear in an increasingly manipulated world of emotions … causes intense discomfort in the reader; whether it’s about real fear, imagined fear or manipulation of feelings .. The writing varies between the different narrators, from insisting desperation to frenzied mockery, from troubling fear to burn-out indifference … a hard-hitting novel”
P2

“Torgersen can be placed into a small, but praiseworthy category of writers playing with both epic and poetic elements … plays with the realistic confines of the novel, thereby challenging the traditional epic scourge which again and again hits both the novel and the fatherland.”
Morgenbladet

“A dark, brutal novel about distress and anxiety. There is nothing merry about Bård Torgersen’s book, but it makes for original and good literature … it is as if reality has been smashed to pieces, and the fragments that are left rub harshly against each other … there is a lot here that defy explanation, that comes across as both terrifying and enigmatic, and it’s this atmosphere of inexplicable fear that characterizes this novel. The project is carried out with great sense of both the disturbing and the deterring”
Hamar Arbeiderblad

“Torgersen (b. 1967) often invites us into a sort of everyday banality, which suddenly changes into the dreamlike and eerie, where a small incident suddenly instils fear and insecurity in the characters … It’s revolting and mentally exhausting, and the reader feels both manipulated and knocked about, but just like the novel’s characters, you are pulled along in fascination with the very things you are disgusted by … there’s no doubt that Bård Torgersen has again delivered a different and disturbing book”
Stavanger Aftenblad

“Please is as clear cut and intense as we have become used to from Torgersen’s dark world … Torgersen is a master in this, in positioning our existence on egg shells – make one false move, take a moment too long to think, try to offer resistance, and everything falls apart … Yes, of course it’s painful, and mostly in the right way, when he lets the pig inside the man loose and lets it feast on the suffering of others. And, no, Torgersen is so, so much more than this – but it’s precisely there, in that fateful moment, when fear enters our world and acts are committed that can never be undone, that Torgersen shows his brilliance by not being cynical, not being calculating, not being sensationalistic. He is just a hell of a writer. Something about mankind is exposed in that moment, a straw of you and me, that few others are able to catch.”
Vårt land