It's Fine by Me, By Per Petterson

Audun is an intelligent teenage boy growing up in 1960s and '70s Norway trying to blank out a miserable family drama.

Having moved with his mother to a working-class suburb of Oslo he spends his non-school times doing newspaper rounds and chatting to his friend about Hemingway. But he's inundated by memories of his alcoholic father, the weeks he spent living in a couple of cardboard boxes and the day of his little brother's birth.

Petterson's melancholic coming of age story, translated by Don Bartlett, promises no last minute epiphanies.