Lars Hertervig is a provincial young Norwegian from a poor Quaker background, studying art in Germany and prone to crippling insecurities, sexual obsessions, and terrifying hallucinations. In prose as hypnotic as Beckett's or Bernhard's - but earthier, and funnier - the novel describes a single day of crisis and its repercussions, years later for Lars himself and a century later for a writer inspired by Hertervig's vision. Melancholy takes us deep inside a painter's fragile consciousness, vulnerable to everything but therefore uniquely able to see its beauty and its light.

In And we'll never be parted, Jon Fosse exploits theatre's unique potential for ambiguity: as a woman anxiously waits for her husband, are we watching reality, fantasy, memory, or even a ghost story? The Son concerns an ageing and isolated couple, whose long-absent son has a score to settle with their meddlesome neighbour. In the oblique but psychologically penetrating Visits, a withdrawn teenager, apparently upset by the attentions of her mother's boyfriend, turns to her brother for help. The short play Meanwhile the lights go down and everything becomes black, exploring the dilemmas of an errant husband, his young lover and his family, displays Fosse's characteristic compression of theatrical time and space at its most concentrated.

In these three seasonal plays Jon Fosse explores the crossover between the poetic and the everyday, as ordinary encounters become pivotal moments in the lives of his characters. Past and present overlap in A Summer's Day, as an elderly widow remembers the day, many years before, when her husband went out to sea and never returned. In a series of continuous but chronologically distinct scenes, Dream of Autumn charts a surprising relationship between a man and an old female friend he encounters: she becomes his second wife and causes him to fall out with his family. In Winter, a fascinating but mercurial woman tries to seduce a businessman, but after giving up his marriage and career for her, he discovers he may have mistaken her intentions. In each of these plays, Fosse's unique use of fractured and repetitive speech rhythms imbues apparently mundane situations with a hypnotic intensity.

Mother and Child is the intense journey of two individuals trying to connect. Like strangers on a first date, mother and son stalk each other, confronted with a shared history they cannot ignore. In Sleep my Baby Sleep, three people are in a strange unnamed place: through visual and linguistic association they try to decipher their predicament. In Afternoon, characters come and go in a flat that is for sale: they will never understand each other; someone will always see one thing, while others will insist on something else. In Beautiful, the past disrupts the present when a man and his family go back to his childhood valley. Conflicts simmer when husband and wife punish each other by courting his best friend, while his daughter meets a local boy. Death Variations explores different aspects of the theme of death: death of love, death of relationship, death of happiness, and finally the death of a young person. As the characters in Fosse's plays search for meaning or even just familiarity in their ruptured lives, their struggles find an echo in the rhythms and repetitions of their speech.

In Someone is Going to Come the two of them want to be together, just the two of them, so they leave the city and buy a remote house by the sea. But is it possible to do what they want to do? Won't somebody come? Surely someone will come. The Guitar Man is a poignant monologue in which a busker sings songs to an audience that is always on the move, always passing him by. The Name (winner of the Ibsen Prize in Norway) tells the story of an estranged family forced to live under one roof. When a pregnant girl and the father of the child have nowhere to live, they move into her parents' house. But the parents have never met the father-to-be, and don't yet know about the pregnancy. In The Child a man and a woman find each other in a bus stop on a rainy night. They hold each other close. They rent an old house out of town. The woman becomes pregnant. But the child is too small to survive.