Celebrated throughout the world for her candor and sensitivity to the rhythms of language, Hanne Ørstavik is a leading light on the international stage. Ørstavik writes with "a compulsion for truth that feels like [her] very life force itself." Laced with a tingling frankness, Ørstavik's prose adheres so closely to the inner workings of its narrator's mind as to nearly undo itself. In Martin Aitken's translation, Ørstavik's piercing story sings. Ti Amo brings a new, deeply personal approach, as the novel is based in Ørstavik's own experience of losing her Italian husband to cancer. By facing loss directly, she includes readers in an experience that many face in isolation. Written and set in the early months of 2020, its themes of loss and suffering are particularly well suited for a time of international mourning.

What can be found within a gaze? What lies inside a painting or behind a handful of repeated words? These are the questions that haunt our unnamed narrator as she tends to her husband, stricken with cancer, in the final months of his life. She examines the elements of their life together: their Vietnamese rose-colored folding table where they eat their meals, each of the New Year's Eves they've shared, their friendships, and their most intimate exchanges. With everything in flux, she searches for the facets that will remain.

Hanne Ørstavik, one of the most admired and prominent writers in contemporary Norwegian fiction, published her first novel, Cut, in 1994. She has since been translated into more than 16 languages. Martin Aitken’s translation of Love was a 2018 National Book Award finalist, and in 2021, Archipelago published his luminous translation of her novel, The Pastor. 

Tess Lewis's translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Maja Haderlap, Christine Angot and Philippe Jaccottet. She has been awarded many grants and awards from PEN USA, PEN UK, and the NEA, and most recently a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She has served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and as Co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and newspapers including Bookforum, Partisan Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald. Tess Lewis was a 2021-22 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.