The Unworthy

<P><B>"Jacobsen can make almost anything catch the light . . . One of Norway''s greatest writers on the working class" Times Literary Supplement</B><br><br>They''re a gang without a name - Olav, Carl, Roar, Jan and Vidar - teenage boys growing up in a working-class area of Oslo under the shadow of Nazi occupation. They live in poverty but earn a crust by creatively swindling their fellow citizens, falsifying documents and stealing like magpies. And they don''t shy away from targeting the Enemy, either.<br><br>But everything changes when Carl''s father hands him a secret map and a German password, just hours before he''s taken away by the Quisling police - only to return in a coffin. And when Olav''s father also disappears, the gang come to see that they are caught up in something far more serious than their usual petty crimes.<br><br>Taking in love, death, betrayal and tragedy, <I>The Unworthy</I> is the latest masterpiece from Roy Jacobsen, author of the International Booker-shortlisted <I>The Unseen</I>. It shines a light on a brutal aspect of the war rarely explored in fiction, and every sentence is imbued with decades of accumulated wisdom from a writer who had his own brushes with the law in his youth.<br><br><B>Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw</B></P>