“Marit Tusvik has written a tremendous, sinister novel about how bad things can get when a person you allow to come close to you turns out to have a hidden side … Tusviks prose is outstanding … a gripping portrait of how you can be trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, not least how small glimpses of the person you love can keep the hope alive. What makes this novel so powerful, in addition to the portrait of the times and the confident prose, is how the dynamics between the two, not least the inscrutable distance between them, is slowly revealed in the most intimate moments”
Information, Denmark
”Marit Tusvik embraces the darkness, the danger – and the power – of the human mind in her wise, multifaceted novel In His Arms, about falling for another person, and getting badly bruised in the fall”
Helsingør Library, nORD Literary Festival Program, Denmark
“The novel takes a turn towards the crime novel, and it becomes impossible to put the book down … The fear that gradually takes control over Sofia’s body, indeed becomes her identity, is very well described … All in all Tusvik has succeeded very well in describing the unfathomable feeling of powerlessness being close to a person with heavy mental illness entails … Tusik succeeds very well in showing the reader how much power encouraging words and warmth can have on a person who is unable to break with her own need for confirmation”
Vårt Land
“It doesn’t happen overnight. Not in a way that is easy to grasp, to notice. All Frank’s good sides – and we have really seen him as a fantastic man – makes us skeptical to the idea that he has been faking it all along … The reader of Marit Tusvik’s very good novel In His Arms sees where it’s headed. But she reads on, because she still wonders how, and why … Tusvik writes incredibly well, with insight and in a captivating way about love, dependence and habit … In his arms might hit many readers straight in the heart, not least those of us who once have tried and failed in love”
Dagsavisen
“Not just an intense and nervewracking bildungsroman, as is always the case in Marit Tusvik’s books this too is full of literary and historical references and quotes, precise metaphors – and a Chinese saying. This is calligraphy from loyalty’s self-effacing and catastrophic territory”
5/6 stars, Stavanger Aftenblad
“A lot of the qualities of Tusvik’s prose is generally contingent on a seemingly simple style. There’s often something naïve about it … as with Solstad, there is in Tusvik’s extensive, varied work a clear interest in and thematic ties to parents, to soil, to family and to previous generations. In Tusvik this takes the form of great energy and a powerful vitality”
Morgenbladet
“A wise novel about love that turns … masterful … Tusvik shows in a wise and insightful way how smart and independent women (and surely men too) can end up in relationships they never imagined, and how difficult it can be too break up”
5/6 stars, Fædrelandsvennen
