Broken - Softcover

HMH hardcover, 2010
Previous ISBN 978-0-15-101366-1

“I always eagerly await a new novel from Karin Fossum.”—Ruth Rendell

“She is a master of the slow build, the controlled burn.”—Chicago Tribune

A woman wakes up in the middle of the night. A strange man is in her bedroom. She lies there in silence, paralyzed with fear. The woman is an author and the man one of her characters, one in a long line that waits in her driveway for the time when she’ll tell their story. He is so desperately eager for his story to be told that he has resorted to breaking into her house and demanding that she begin.
      He, the author decides, is named Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, works in a gallery. He lives a quiet, orderly life and likes it that way—no demands, no unpleasantness. Until an icy winter afternoon when a young drug addict, skinny and fragile, walks into the gallery. Alvar gives her a cup of coffee to warm her up. She returns to the gallery a few weeks later, and then one day she appears on his doorstep.

“Haunting . . . The author’s narrative skills are on dazzling display.”—Washington Post

Karin Fossum is the author of the internationally successful Inspector Konrad Sejer crime series. She received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her novel The Indian Bride. She lives in a small town in southeastern Norway.