The Morning Star

The novel follows nine interconnected characters in and around Bergen, Norway, over two days in late August, as a mysterious new star appears in the sky and inexplicable events ripple through their lives. Each chapter is narrated by a different character; together, the chapters form a portrait of ordinary existence touched by forces that resist rational explanation.

Arne, a university professor, is spending the last days of summer at a coastal house in southern Norway with his wife Tove, an artist, their daughter Ingvild, and twin sons Asle and Heming. Tove has a psychiatric condition that causes manic episodes, and she has been escalating for days. After she accidentally kills one of their kittens, Arne discovers a note hidden in her studio reading "I want to fuck Egil," their neighbor, written three times. Throughout the day, animal anomalies multiply, including hundreds of crabs massing in the bay. That evening, drinking whisky with Egil, a former documentary filmmaker, Arne is surprised when Egil reveals he believes in God. Tove joins them but spirals into uncontrollable laughter. Increasingly drunk, Arne drives out and encounters crabs crawling across the road. A massive blazing light rises over the ridge: An enormous new star appears in the sky.

Kathrine, a priest in the Church of Norway, flies home to Bergen from a seminar in Oslo. On the plane, she realizes she does not want to return to her husband Gaute and their children Peter and Marie. She impulsively checks into a hotel and calls her mother, admitting she may want a divorce. Returning home the next day, she faces Gaute's suspicion that she has been unfaithful, which she refuses to confirm or deny. At a funeral she conducts for Kristian Hadeland, who died with no known relatives, Kathrine recognizes the deceased as the same man who spoke to her at the airport, though his death was registered ten days earlier. Gaute finds a pregnancy test in her bag and accuses her of infidelity, deepening their crisis.

Emil, a young nursery school worker and aspiring musician, accidentally lets a toddler fall from a changing table and leaves work consumed with guilt. That night, walking home after band rehearsal, he sees the new star rise as birds burst into song. A terrified man crashes out of the woods behind his house, stares at him, and vanishes.

Iselin, a lonely 19-year-old who dropped out of university and works a supermarket checkout, encounters a strange man who declares "I am the Lord" and runs his hand through her hair. Later, she sees fire erupt from a building, but no one else sees it; she has hallucinated. That night, Jesper, her landlords' son and a member of the death metal band Kvitekrist, pounds on her door in terror. When police arrive, they cannot find him anywhere in the house, though Iselin never heard him leave.

Solveig, a nurse managing a hospital ward in western Norway, cares for her mother, who has Parkinson's disease, and hosts her daughter Line for an unexpected visit. At the hospital, she develops a quiet connection with Inge, a patient whose brain tumor causes vivid hallucinations. She also tends to Ramsvik, a prominent politician paralyzed by a stroke. When Ramsvik is declared brain-dead and a transplant team begins harvesting his organs, he opens his eyes and his heart resumes beating. The surgeon orders the team never to speak of it.

Jostein, a crime reporter demoted to the arts section of a Bergen newspaper and estranged from his son Ole, spends a night drinking and suffers episodes of blackout in which he floats above a bright room of faces. His police contact calls at 3:30 a.m.: Three members of Kvitekrist have been found murdered at Svartediket reservoir, their bodies skinned and mutilated, with stones arranged in a pentagram around a bonfire. The fourth member, the drummer Jesper, is missing.

Turid, Jostein's wife, works a night shift at a care facility for residents with intellectual disabilities. When Kenneth, a non-verbal resident, escapes into the woods, Turid pursues him and witnesses a massive figure with an ox-like head and yellow eyes emerge from the trees, touch Kenneth's forehead, and vanish. Back inside, Kenneth opens his mouth and appears to speak for the first time, rasping words that sound like "You are doomed."

Vibeke, a museum curator married to the famous architect Helge Bråthen, prepares for his surprise 60th birthday party. Their terrace is swarmed by thousands of ladybugs, mirroring the animal anomalies elsewhere. Helge shares his idea that the laws of nature are not fixed but are habits, and that something genuinely new can happen at any time. In the building's basement, Vibeke discovers a terrified young man who whispers, "Help me. You've got to help me."

On the second day, Arne discovers Tove has decapitated the family cat, leaving its head on her studio desk. One painting depicts a humanoid figure with a pigtail beneath a bright star, finished before the real star appeared. He drives Tove to a psychiatric hospital, where she cannot state her name or recognize him. Before he leaves, she says: "Everyone's dead. We're all dead." Stopping at Egil's house, Arne finds it empty: The door is open and Egil's car, bike, and boat are present, but Egil and his 10-year-old son Viktor are gone.

Egil's chapters trace his spiritual life. He experienced a conversion the previous winter while reading Kierkegaard, embracing a faith centered on relinquishing the self to find the Divine. His ex-partner Camilla sends Viktor without warning. The boy is hostile and afraid, confessing he fears death after seeing a figure at his window that he insists is not human. An eerie clicking sound repeats from the woods, the same sound Turid heard at the care facility.

Turid returns home from her shift to find Ole missing. She discovers him in the garage, shot in the chest with Jostein's shotgun. Paramedics detect a faint heartbeat.

Jostein learns Ole has shot himself, but before he can reach the hospital, the blackouts return. He wakes in a leafless forest with no memory, having drunk from Lethe, the mythological river of forgetting. He wanders a primeval landscape and finds Ole sitting against a rock face. Ole asks, "Dad? What are you doing here? Are you dead?" and walks away. Jostein's dead grandmother appears, restores fragments of his memory, and warns him not to follow a deep hum that draws the dead toward it. He witnesses a ship burial performed by ox-headed figures before waking in a hospital bed after 13 days in a coma. Ole is alive but critical.

The novel closes with Egil's essay, "On Death and the Dead," found on the typewriter in his empty house. It traces conceptions of death from the earliest humans through Egyptian and Greek traditions and argues that death may not be a fixed law but an evolutionary habit. The essay recounts Egil seeing a dead girl at a swimming pool, her skull visibly crushed, perceptible only to him and the girl's father. Referring to the new star as the Morning Star, Egil concludes: "I know what it means. It means that it has begun," suggesting the boundary between the living and the dead is dissolving.