Read This: The Ferryman and His Wife, by Frode Grytten

Only a few pages into The Ferryman and His Wife, I was heartbroken that this story would ever end.

I read it as slowly as I could, savoring this spare, beautiful novel from celebrated Norwegian author Frode Grytten, translated by Alison McCullough, which recounts ferryman Nils Vik’s last day on earth. We follow Nils as he leaves his house for the final time, boards his faithful 36-foot wooden boat, and travels his typical route among the remote fjords, but also back in time as he revisits the events of his ordinary life, which becomes extraordinary in Grytten’s telling.

Providing a lifeline to inhabitants of far-flung villages and farms, this quiet, simple man participated in people’s most important moments—escape and homecoming, heartbreak and love, death and birth, opportunity and disappointment. Now his former passengers, all dead, board one by one to accompany him on his last run, but Nils Vik is searching only for his beloved wife, Marta.

Along the journey, he revisits the most wonderful and difficult moments of his life.

He thinks, “All these last times. The end is never as you imagine it, and the end is everything, is it not?” he thinks to himself. Even through the most devastating episodes, Grytten brings us soundly through as deftly as his character leads passengers to safety amid the dangerous waters of the fjords.

Reading this book, I found myself homesick for a landscape I’ve never seen.

I longed for the icy and remote fjords of Norway and their crushing beauty, their mutability and steadiness, the changing face of the water, the swelling ebb and flow of the current, the “milky fog drifting down the mountainside,” rushing wind, the lights of farmsteads seen from the water.

With his boat Nils Vik has “created this little waiting room in time for people,” which could be a way to think of life itself and also a way to think of this novel, which carries the reader over and through, reflecting on the everyday made remarkable. Gorgeous and devastating in its simplicity, The Ferryman and His Wife takes us to the heart of the matter—life and how we live it but also how we leave it.

Publication date: November 18, 2025. Pre-order now wherever you buy books.