Rat Island and Other Stories

Jo Nesbø, a Norwegian writer and a leading representative of Nordic noir, continues to amaze. Breaking stereotypes and disregarding the rules of the genre, he shows a person so candidly, as if we ourselves were looking in the mirror, afraid... to admit: it's me. “There is no censorship in my head and there will never be,” says Nesbø. He never reveals his intentions in advance, and until recently, it was only known that the writer was working on two collections of short prose. The first includes seven crime stories united by the theme of jealousy. In the second, Nesbø addresses the theme of the extinction of humanity.
Our civilization is dying slowly but inevitably, the foundations of society are crumbling, and people are losing their human semblance — but these are too general phrases for such an unpredictable, ambiguous, paradoxical author. Nesbø, like no one else, knows how to maneuver between themes, change perspectives; he either embodies his characters or studies them distantly, and in their actions against the backdrop of the ordinary or, conversely, in completely fantastical situations, the fateful contradictions of modern worldview, moral relativism, which leads humanity into the dead end of self-destruction, manifest. It is human nature to make mistakes, but while he is tossing between black and white at the edge of the abyss, he has a chance for salvation...