MAYDAY

Written by Grethe Bøe

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

UK RRP £18.99

978-1-91449-534-2

28 September 2023

234 x 153 mm

Film rights sold.

Hardback

304 pages

80,000 words

Fiction / Thriller & Suspense

First female writer in Norway's male-dominated thriller genre. Comparison titles include The Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum and The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy.

Fighter pilot Ylva Nordahl has returned to her hometown, Bodø, in Norway's frozen north where tension is escalating across the border with Russia as a result of NATO’s ’Arctic Blizzard’ exercise. 60,000 troops have been mobilised, many of them American. One single false move could trigger a major political crisis, or even war.

John Evans, an American pilot and Ylva, his younger Norwegian co-pilot, are forced to eject over Russian territory and then to escape from the Spetsnaz special forces determined to find them.

As the hunt closes in, Ylva uses what she learned from years spent with the Sami people to survive the excruciating cold and brutal terrain and her family history reveals dark secrets of its own in this geopolitical game of chess.

Grethe Bøe is a Norwegian screenwriter and award-winning film director. Mayday is her first novel.

Charlotte Barslund is a translator of Scandinavian literature. Her translation of Karin Fossum's Calling Out For You was nominated for a Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award.