Child Wonder, By Roy Jacobsen Maclehose

Roy Jacobsen returns to 1960s Oslo for the setting of this affecting novel of childhood misunderstandings.

The narrator is a young boy called Finn who lives with his mother in a cramped apartment. It's a time before "anyone had any money at all".

One day a half-sister appears in his life, "small, and fat and quiet with her eyes boring into the tarmac".

Over the course of the novel Finn battles to penetrate the little girl's blankness, while trying to work out his mother's secrets.

His anxieties are tenderly voiced by translators Don Bartlett and Don Shaw.