The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting - #TuesdayTeaser

 Welcome to this weeks Tuesday Teaser. The place where I give you a sneak peek at a book that has caught my eye.

This weeks book is The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Mytting. This book was first published in hardback in the UK in 2017 by Maclehose Press. It is now available in all formats. It has been translated from Norwegian by Paul Russell Garrett. 

Lars Mytting was born in Norway in 1968. He has worked as a journalist and editor for various Norwegian newspapers. He is best known in the UK as the author of The Bell in the Lake and Norwegian Wood.

I am surprised that I have not stumbled across this book before but now that I have I will be reading it sometime soon. Has this excerpt tickled your reading taste buds?

The Blurb

Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents, when he was three years old, has always been shrouded in mystery - he has never been told how or where it took place and has only a distant memory of his mother.

But he knows that the fate of his grandfather's brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with this mystery. One day a coffin is delivered for his grandfather long before his death - a meticulous, beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps Einar is not dead after all.

Edvard's desperate quest to unlock the family's tragic secrets takes him on a long journey - from Norway to the Shetlands, and to the battlefields of France - to the discovery of a very unusual inheritance. The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is about the love of wood and finding your own self, a beautifully intricate and moving tale that spans an entire century.

First Page

Chapter 1 - Like Ashes in the Wind

For me my mother was a scent. She was a warmth. A leg I clung to. A breath of something blue; a dress I remember her wearing. She fired me into the world with a bowstring, I told myself, and when I shaped my memories of her, I did not know if they were true, I simply created her as I thought a son should remember his mother.

Mamma was the one I thought of when I tested the loss inside me. Seldom Pappa. Sometimes I asked myself if he would have been like all the other fathers in the district. Men in Home Guard uniforms; in football trainers at old boys' practice; getting up early at the weekends to volunteer at Saksum's local association of hunters and anglers. But I let them fade away without regret. I accepted it, for many years at least, as proof that my grandfather, Bestefar, had tried his best to do everything Pappa would have done, and that he had in fact succeeded.

Bestefar used the broken tip of a Russian bayonet as a knife. It had a flame-birch handle, and that was the only real carpentering he had ever done. The top edge of the blade was dull, and he used that to scrape off rust and to bend steel wire. He kept the other side sharp enough to slice open heavy sacks of agricultural lime. A quick thrust and the white granules would trickle out of their own accord, ready for me to spread across the fields.

The sharp and the dull edges converged into a dagger-like point, and with that he would dispatch the fish we caught on Lake Saksum. He would remove the hook as the powerful trout flapped about, furious to be drowning in oxygen. Place them over the gunwale, force the tip of the blade through their skulls and boast about how broad they were. It was always then that I would raise the oars to watch the thick blood trickle down his steel blade, while thin drops of water ran down my oars.

But the drops flowed into each other. The trout bled out and became our fish from our lake.

ISBN: 978-0857056061

Publisher: MacLehose Press

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What an evocative beginning. It has made me want to read more. What about you?