Misrule
A novel by Hans Tarjei Skaare
Misrule is a novel about creeping authoritarianism in a country like our own, a few years from now, and what it does to people who fight for democracy and free speech.
Published in Norwegian as Vanstyre. In bookshops, libraries and online.
English translation available on request.
Calidris Forlag · 2026 · ISBN 978-82-8467-449-0
About the book
We follow three people in a newspaper newsroom who fight for democracy and free speech. The country has gone from monarchy to republic, and its first president is growing steadily more authoritarian. When the newsroom receives a story that casts doubt on the president and his politics, it creates difficulties.
Why is Arvo, the editor, not as clear as he usually is? And why does Nomi, the photographer, grow uncertain, and Petrus, the journalist, fall silent? What is at stake for the individual, for the newspaper and for the country? There is a connection here, but it is not an obvious one.
The author says
The book has taken seven years. When I began writing it, many of the outward circumstances felt almost improbable. But time has shown otherwise, with authoritarian forces rising where we least expect them – both far away and close to home.
All probability aside – this is not only a book about outward development, but about inward development too. And not least about personal integrity. What I hope the reader takes from the novel is a sense of what one can do oneself where power accumulates – and of seeing through whatever might stand in the way of that.
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I wanted to write about Spirit in and among people, not as something handed down from above, but as the steady work of reflecting and relating, as it comes to us in the inheritance from antiquity, with know thyself, and from Christianity, with love thy neighbour. I think of these as both the greatest and the most demanding virtues in our culture.
Working on the novel, I saw how people and events were connected in a way I had not reasoned my way to – as though there were a meaning in what I was writing forth. ‘Writing forth’ has been exactly the right description of this process, in which it is the resonance of the words more than any plan that has steered the text.
