“I begin on a Sunday evening in August 1963. I was left alone in a room at Langmyrvegen 16 in Molde after my mother and father, who had accompanied me there, had said goodbye and returned home with the local taxi. Now my real life was about to begin. I was going to become a person in the modern world, in my time, not one of many in the long line of farmers from whom I descended, in a landscape where time stood still. That’s how I thought about it. I didn’t understand that I was still a child.”

Young Man Wants Out is a memoir novel that closely examines a young mind and an era. In the late summer of 1963, fourteen-year-old Edvard moves to Molde. He is going to attend the secondary school, as it was called then, in the city – a small town, admittedly, but much larger than the village he moves from. He is young, and he wants out. More than sixty years later, the aging Edvard writes about him: the young man’s bitter defeats, great joys, nagging doubts, and boundless ambitions.