Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions.
      In this second instalment of Jon Fosse’s Septology, ‘a major work of Scandinavian fiction’ (Hari Kunzru), the two Asles meet for the first time in their youth. They look strangely alike, dress identically, and both want to be painters. At art school in Bjørgvin, Asle meets and falls in love with his future wife, Ales. Written in melodious and hypnotic ‘slow prose’, I is Another: Septology III-V is an exquisite metaphysical novel about love, art, God, friendship, and the passage of time.

‘Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.’
— Catherine Taylor, Guardian

‘The reader of I is Another is both on the riverbank and inthe water being carried forward, and around, by the great, shaping, and completely engrossing, flow of Fosse’s words. It’s a doubleness of view that is reflected in the characters, named Asle, who are both one and other, and through which we can see and feel the world, and ourselves, more clearly.’
— David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

Praise for The Other Name: Septology I-II

‘Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative, which is only the first part of what promises to be a major work of Scandinavian fiction.’
— Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

‘There is, in this book’s rhythmic accumulation of words, something incantatory and self-annihilating – something that feels almost holy.’
— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

‘Septology is on its way to becoming some of Fosse’s most meaningful art, his singular picture finally dislodged.’
— Spencer Ruchti, Music and Literature

‘The Other Name trembles with the beauty, doubt, and gnostic weariness of great religious fiction. In Fosse’s hands, God is a difficult, pungent, overwhelmingly aesthetic force, ‘the invisible inside the visible’.
— Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages. The Other Name is the first volume in Septology, his latest prose work, will be published in three volumes by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Damion Searls is an award-winning translator from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated five books and a libretto by Jon Fosse – Melancholy (co-translated with Grethe Kvernes), Aliss at the Fire, Morning and Evening (novel and libretto), Scenes from a Childhood and The Other Name, the first volume of Septology, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize – and books by many other classic modern writers.