In the middle of July 1975, while most of the population is on holiday, an announcement on public radio is addressed to the driver of a grey Volkswagen Beetle, a woman with two daughters aged 12 and 14: “Call home”.

Sigrid is camping with her girls, and all she wants for herself is a week of quiet. Away from their tiny house. Away from her boss, with whom she has been having an affair. The summer is unusually hot, and Sigrid is enjoying her freedom. But then her sister Kristin disappears.

In this novel we follow Sigrid, a single mother who is about to publish her first book, and Kristin, a housewife who cuts the buttons off her husband’s shirt instead of ironing it. This is the summer when everything changes.

Line Baugstø has written a captivating novel, where we again meet the characters from the acclaimed A Summer without Letters.

Praise for Driver of a Grey Beetle, July 1975:

Baugstø anchors the text elegantly in the seventies, without hitting us over the head with it … It would be great to follow Sigrid through more books, into the eighties and closer to our own time
Dagsavisen

“Baugstø continues her precise, beautiful period portrait of the 1960s and 70s … At hear there is the question of the choices we make, and why. And Line Baugstø invites us to an eventful odyssey through a decade where powerful contradictions, tendencies and ideologies make themselves felt.”
Hamar Arbeiderblad

“The book gives us new perspectives of our time, but is also a novel about grief, longing, and the struggle to find out who you are”
Fædrelandsvennen, Books of the Year 2016