The Driftwood Keyboard

About this book

Tromsø, 1974. Eilif Brekke is sixty-six, a widower, and the author of The Dark Year, the memoir every Norwegian schoolchild reads: how, in the polar winter of 1932, a young trapper nursed a dying Danish rival in a hut at the edge of Greenland and buried him under stones. On a rainy October morning a Danish archivist sets a tin box on his kitchen table. Inside is the Dane's own diary, and the news that the Dane lived another thirty-six years. Eilif agrees to tell her the story properly, the true version this time. But the old man at the table has been telling it one way for twenty-two years, and the diary keeps answering back. On Monday his grandson's class expects him. Before then he must decide what the truth is worth, and who it belongs to.