Trondheim
In Norway, thousands of miles from home, a student drops dead on the street. A passerby revives his heart, but he remains in a coma from which he may never wake. His mothers rush across the continent to his bedside where they endure the strain of helpless waiting. As the tense hospital vigil continues day after day and they vacillate between extremes of hope, fear, and psychic pain, their troubled relationship is pushed to the edge. A profound exploration of a family in crisis, Trondheim portrays the way each woman copes with the looming tragedy and the possibility of healing in the wake of a life-altering emergency.
Read the novel’s opening chapter in Harper’s Magazine.
Editor’s Choice, New York Times Book Review
Kirkus: Most Anticipated Books of 2024
LGBTQ Reads: Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ fiction of 2024
“An X-ray picture of the subcutaneous breaks and sprains in a rocky relationship. When their son collapses, an unhappy couple travels to his bedside, leaving behind none of their exquisitely described marital baggage … Irish writer James’ delicate, incisive novel … captures with forensic accuracy the subtle tensions in the marriage. … [Their son’s] medical situation is acute and dramatic, but the women’s marital troubles, mundane and chronic, are the real subject of this extraordinary and meticulous book.”
— Kirkus (starred review)
“delicately and deeply probes the mothers and their relationship.”
— New York Times Book Review
“a poignant meditation on grief, perseverance, and the complications of love.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
“A crisis exposes faultlines in a marriage in Cormac James’s whipsmart, lyrical novel Trondheim … scalpel-sharp lyricism pares back their emotional and psychological states. Meticulous details expose their private anxieties and maternal devastation too … Trondheim is an exquisite novel that explores maternal love, the price of hope, and how bodies endure.”
— Foreword Reviews
“James’ elegant novel will leave [readers] shattered and uplifted.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books
“For the past two days, at random intervals, this or that machine had occasionally given off a polite beep. Occasionally some other machine had answered it, morning chorus, call and response. Now one of them started to cheep and would not stop, and Alba would never have thought that something so neat and well schooled could have such a terrible effect. Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep. It felt like pressure rising measure by measure within her own chest, and like a repeated stab meant to make that pressure burst.”
For how I found my way into Trondheim, visit Granta, Notes on Craft
For a deep reading of how images are used in Trondheim, read Michael Collins’ essay in North of Oxford literary journal.
For more information, visit Bellevue Literary Press