A young woman returns to her childhood island in the north of Norway, fifteen years after her father killed her mother and himself. She wants to come to terms with why this tragedy took place, but she also discovers that her homecoming stirs up memories from the past. The border between the past and the present, between her mother and herself, is gradually erased. The woman feels her mother’s desperation; she feels her father’s rage. She also discovers that her mother had a lover on the opposite coast of the island and she empathises with her passion. Or does she feel her own?

Praise for Unspeakable Events:

“Many novels have been written about homecomings, about returning to the site of incidents which have marked one for life. Gøhril Gabrielsen does this exquisitely. She shifts between concrete occurrences and indeterminate fear, between dreamlike sequences where mother and daughter merge into one, and detailed renderings of characters so lifelike you shudder, using means such as shifting from the first to the third person in direct speech, and by an economical use of imagery. Not least, the author describes in a riveting fashion the minute glimpses of happiness found in the everyday…Gøhril Gabrielsen’s Unspeakable Events lives on for a long time in the reader.”
Bergens Tidende