Riksteatret: Kniven i ilden

Ingeborg Arvola's captivating historical novel has gone straight to the heart of a record-breaking audience. The book has received fantastic reviews and has sold 60,000 copies. Finally, the book is being staged!

The year is 1859. Brita Caisa is alone with two children. To give her children the security they deserve, she straps on her skis and sets off on the long journey from Finland to Norway to find a man she can have a safe life with. On the way, things happen that shouldn't happen.

Brita Caisa is a woman who leaves, a woman who dares to stand up to the condemnation of others. The Knife in the Fire is a captivating story about work and love, strong unity and free eroticism, the individual and the authorities.

Arvola's own great-great-great-grandmother
Brita Caisa Seipajærvi was Ingeborg Arvola's great-great-great-grandmother. Arvola writes so that you can smell the blood after the reindeer slaughter, taste the mullets, feel the cold from the snow and the warmth from the fire. Arvola also highlights the Kven and Sami culture and gives us a unique picture of a story that should have a greater place in our collective memory.

When the book becomes a theater for the whole country with the Riksteatret and Kväänitatteri, it is star director Cecilie Mosli (Grey’s Anatomy, Three Nuts for Cinderella, The Snow Maiden) who takes Arvola’s magnificent epic to the stage with Lena Kristin Ellingsen, Ivar Beddari, Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes, Arthur Hakalahti, Bernt Bjørn and Pernille Sandøy in the roles.

Said about the novel:

"Wonderful and magnificent"
VG (6)

"It’s been a long time since I’ve read about a hot love longing – and an equally steamy love affair – in a Norwegian novel."

NRK

"A captivating and historically interesting novel (…) Can be read in one greedy gulp"

Dagbladet (5)

"Overall, Arvola writes really, really well. Insanely well, in fact. Like a dream you didn't know you were walking around with."
Berlingske (5)

"With an almost invisible hand, Arvola sneaks in details about time, place and environment, which makes the reader considerably wiser than they were before"

Aftenposten

"Love and sex of the forbidden kind, marriages that are breaking up, parents and children that are splitting up, the economy that is cracking, a local community that has something to gossip about [...] above all, it is the forbidden attraction and love between Brita Caisa and the married Askan Mikko that gives the story its energy."
Klassekampen