«Life is an adventure, a miracle, a mystery. But at the same time it has a dark background: it takes billions of years to create a human being, and only seconds to see it disappear.
JOSTEIN GAARDER

A 60-year-old, eccentric and passionate Indo-European scholar in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oslo, Jakop leads a solitary life. With no children or close relatives, he only maintains a relationship with his ex-wife and his friend Pelle. But leading such a small social life does not seem to matter in the least, since a peculiar activity completely occupies his days and, by extension, the entirety of his existence: he attends the funerals of people he does not know, he mixes with the relatives and he recalls for them the most endearing anecdotes of his fictitious relationship with the deceased, small stories that, unfailingly, deeply affect those present. Until one day, in one of the burials, Jakop meets Agnes ...

With his unrivaled ability to approach the deepest and most transcendental with apparent lightness, the author of The World of Sofia offers us an unforgettable novel whose center actually resides in man and his eternal questions about the meaning of the universe.