Long Live the Post Horn!

An emotional, philosophical read...this book is wonderful, and I would urge you to seek it out.

Immersive, original...I really would urge you to read it, to be surprised, and to maybe let it change the way you see certain things.

A superb story about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Wrenching tenderness from the mouth of irony, Hjorth proves how major effects don’t always come from the heavy-foot pedals.

Long Live the Post Horn! is a brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose ... Hjorth’s novel ingeniously orbits the intimate stories that are possible only when a character has put words on paper and sent them through the post.

A wry and thoughtful take on contemporary life and love ... Full of gorgeous Scandi gloom and bleak truths about human relationships

[In] Long Live the Post Horn!, the saga of the EU postal directive is an inspired context for a story about personal despair and political awakening.

An acidic portrait of one woman’s fight to save the postal service.

An engaging, well-honed novel ... Hjorth's writing is both spare and, in an understated way, humorous.

Hjorth holds a magnifying glass to her characters and they fry like ants under the merciless sunlight of her writing. No one of them escapes unscathed, there are no heroes or villains; what we get is a picture of life in a social democracy that is fraying at the edges.

Hjorth expertly interrogates feelings of inadequacy in concise paragraphs of wry prose

Droll and rather delightful

A novel about the chicanery of governmental politics has no right to be this absorbing

A big strange wonderful paper hug of a book ... I cannot recommend it highly enough

Hjorth asks us to imagine a world where those with narrative power protect the stories of the people over the interests of commerce. ... The timing was right for this book in Norway in 2012, and the timing is right for us now. A novel like Long Live the Post Horn! does not come around often enough.

funny, wry, insightful, and finally sincere.

The brilliance of Vigdis Hjorth is her ability to match a distinctive lack of sentimentality with a seductive and questing idealism

Hjorth’s novel is a jolting tour de force impossible to put down, gleaming with philosophical insight and tenderness in the most unexpected places.

Slim but fulfilling ... Hjorth’s brisk, spare prose invigorates Long Live the Post Horn!, making it a captivating read.

Luminous ... Lucidly translated by Charlotte Barslund, this slight novel – a chapterless stream of consciousness interrupted by dialogue – can be read in a single sitting.

Gripping, inspiring, and politically revolutionary

Long Live the Post Horn! is an ordinary person’s epic tale of how it feels to emerge from the thralldom of apathy: how one feeble movement unleashes the torrential energy of life renewed.

Made me want to storm the barricades of Royal Mail

A strange and funny and psychologically incisive novel about how community can revitalise, how grassroots activism and empathy are the salves in a world made lonely and malignant by individualism

Long Live the Post Horn! is a reaffirming novel that reminds one of how sliding into depression is so seamless it barely registers as motion of any kind.