Slide

After 29 years of marriage literary critic, author and sixth-form teacher, Finn Stein Larsen, leaves his wife for one of his students. In the family home the bookcases gape emptily, and young Jesper is left with a desperate, bitter and stunned mother who demands his undivided loyalty. He is trapped between his parents and ends up living a double life as an apparently party-loving, womanizing hell raiser, while privately becoming a shoulder to cry on for his mother in a relationship which increasingly blurs parental boundaries.
The divorce has a huge impact on everyone’s lives and affects the family for decades to come – in the parents’ case right up until their death.

"Slide" is told and conceived by the now adult author, who has himself also betrayed, divorced and used alcohol to escape the pain of living. The novel can be read as the author’s attempt to understand and come to terms with past betrayals and make peace with his parents and with himself.

"Slide" is a brutal narrative which stays with you long after the last page has been turned. It is a close-up on a life that will appeal to readers of Vigdis Hjort, Linn Ullmann and Karl-Ove Knausgård.

About the author 

Jesper Stein (b. 1965) spent 10 years as a legal and crime reporter in Copenhagen. He is the author of the bestseller You Hunt a Beast and Catch a Human, a biography of the head of Danish Security and Intelligence Service – Denmark’s answer to the FBI – which has sold 30,000 copies and the acclaimed Axel Steen-series, with more than 300.000 copies sold in Denmark. As a journalist, Jesper Stein has travelled the world, covering wars in the Balkans in the 1990s and famines in Africa.