The Ferryman and His Wife - Frode Grytten - ★★

AUTHOR: Frode Grytten

TRANSLATOR: Alison McCullough

NARRATOR: Colin Mace

GENRE: Literary Fantasy

PUBLICATION DATE: November 18, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary fantasy-fiction set on a fjord in Norway. Introspective, not morbid. Too many characters, too meandering and monotonous for my liking. Some unnecessary triggering and crass content. Better for those who are more about prose than plot. Recommended, but not to all.

Plot Preview:

One morning, Nils Vik, a ferryman, wakes up and knows that it will be the day he dies. He still wants to follow his routine, so after his morning routine, he looks around his empty house for one last time, walks out, and boards his beloved boat that he has been ferrying on the fjord for many years. As he sets off, his dead dog joins him, and one by one, several other souls also make their way to Nils Vik one by one across each of the ferry stops. Each, including the dog, discusses several things from the past, sometimes offering the ferryman a new perspective on the matter. But Nils Vik is actually waiting only for one person to join his final journey: his late wife Marta.

The story comes to us in the ferryman’s third-person perspective.

This book was originally written in Norwegian in 2023 and won the Brage Prize, the most prestigious of the Norwegian Literature Prizes. This English translation was published in November 2025.

This book is like a twisty extended take on the belief that we see our life flashing before our eyes at the time of our death. Nils is going through the same, traversing a lifetime of memories during his final journey on his ferry on the day of his death.

Nils Vik’s story reminded me of Charon, the ferryman from the Greek underworld. Nils also ends up carrying a boat full of souls, except that it is he who is being led towards his final destination, unlike Charon who is just the guide for others.

Bookish Yays:

⛵ The intriguing start, wherein Nils Vik knows that he will die that day and takes care of certain things before leaving his house. Strikingly written.

⛵ The description of the fjords and of the value of a ferry for the remote islands. Just beautiful!

⛵ The “epilogue”, revealing details of Nils Vik as a person through quotes by his passengers. An interesting way to commemorate the character whose last day we just read.

Bookish Okays:

⛰ The various passengers interacting with Nils Vik, either in the present as souls or in his memories of the past. Some are really interesting, some are just token additions. Most character development is superficial, but it’s interesting that Nils also recollects the passengers who weren’t good people. It might have been better to limit the number of characters to the significant ones who impacted Nils Vik’s life. Of the passengers, Marta is the most intriguing but Luna the dog is the overall best character. I like that she gets a voice to speak to Nils Vik on this final journey.

Bookish Nays:

🚣🏻‍♀️ The title and the cover. The original Norwegian title “Den dagen Nils Vik døde’ translates to “The Day Nils Vik Died” – a much better title than the English version. Marta isn't so vital to the narrative to need an equal billing in the title with Nils. The cover of the English edition also, though beautiful, is slightly misleading.

🚣🏻‍♀️ The plot execution. Though the book starts off well, the proceedings soon go meandering, drifting aimlessly wherever the ferryman takes it. Not for those who like structure.

🚣🏻‍♀️ The overall tone. More monotonous than melancholic despite the potential for emotions. The end result is a bit too bland to create a longterm impact.

🚣🏻‍♀️ The writing. Feels too deliberate at times, like it was purposely trying to be literary and poetic in equal measure. This might work for some readers, but it is not to my reading preference. (This doesn’t seem like a translation issue, but I can't be sure.)

🚣🏻‍♀️ The gratuitous inclusion of vicious dog killing. There was no need to make the scene so graphic. Or to even have the scene in the first place. I’m fed up of books using animal cruelty frivolously.

🚣🏻‍♀️ The crass sexual content. I wasn’t initially sure if the author was a man or a woman and intended to check once I was done with the book. But this writing choice left me in no doubt. A senior character married that long to a woman and still thinking of how she offered to do what she did in their initial days of couplehood – classic ‘man writing woman’. 🙄 This spoiled the overall introspective atmosphere of the book for me.

🚣🏻‍♀️ The ending. Somewhat abrupt. The most important ‘why’ stays unanswered.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 4 hrs 23 min, is narrated by Colin Mace. He does a pretty good job bringing Nils and his complex day to life, but given the topic and the writing approach, I wouldn’t recommend the audio version except to the most avid of listeners. The lack of structure and the plethora of characters are bound to create some confusion and zoning-out otherwise.

Overall, I expected to like the book far better given the praise I have seen showered on it. But most of it wasn’t to my taste. The slow pacing and introspective content were fine, but the lack of structure, the needless sexual and graphic inclusions, the flat character development, and the overly lyrical writing weren’t my cup of tea.

Recommended to those literary fiction readers who value prose over plot and don’t mind a lack of structure or depth in the characters.