“Disturbing and intense from one of the leading Norwegian practitioners of this genre … It feels like paper thin incisions in the consciousness … Lindstrøm doesn’t necessarily strip the prose to the bone, she cuts away and shades. As a consequence of this method, she also often refrains from climaxes or clear solutions … In this way, a distinct realism arises from the carefully constructed incompleteness, a powerful, lingering sensation that this, precisely this, is what being a human can be all about”
Leif Bull, Dagens Næringsliv

“Lindstrøm masters the short story genre like few others … Few can equal how she uses a tight format to sketch nuanced moods, unspoken conflicts and delicate relationships … There is often something nerve-racking in Lindstrøm’s style, something unspoken, a secret writing behind the real story … Merethe Lindstrøm is a master at filling these wordless relationships with meaning. Often with sombreness and uncertainty, but written in a prose so precise that it’s a joy to continue to fill out her careful suggestions”
Inger Bentzrud, Dagbladet

“Stories for dark evenings. Love comes to an end in six different way in this smouldering short story collection … This author is too skilled to write a weak story”
Ingunn Økland, Aftenposten

“[Lindstrøm] writing as been called a literature of doubt … when I read these twelve stories in Lindstrøm’s new book Winterhorse, I feel that this is correct. For the characters Lindstrøm writes about is constantly trying to figure out what they really want … A search for meaning like this opens up a plethora of nuances, and this is where Lindstrøm is really good. Her prose is lucid, but it still hides a lot of what is going on … Instead of complete clarity -when do we get that in life? – gives the stories many small flashes of precise observations … These transient communities are among the most beautiful things in Lindstrøm’s stories, how the characters, who all have their struggles, reach out to each other”
Ulla Svalheim, Vårt Land

“Her short stories are often described as ‘disturbing’, but the inner pressure in this year’s collection hits hardest when they are at their most intense. It’s not unease that best characterizes the inner life of the narrator in ‘Winterhorse’, but shrill doubt”
Carina Elisabeth Beddari, Morgenbladet

“Both as a novelist and a short story writer, Lindstrøm belongs to the upper echelon of Scandinavian prose writers. The web of possible threads makes it tempting to read Winterhorse again several times, to look for new interconnections. Lindstrøm’s stories dig out insights and feelings that otherwise seems hidden, far down in a common European post-war history”
Tom Egil Hverven, Klassekampen

“With her seventh short story collection Winterhorse, Merethe Lindstrøm again show her outstanding command of language and her psychological sharpness … the silence between the words creates tensions and reveals emotions and dissonance between people … Lindstrøm is a master in revealing these secret points of pain in people’s lives … These flashes of shrouded life lying just beneath the seemingly normal and trivial. Few can perform this number as brilliantly as she”
Turid Larsen, Dagsavisen