Reminiscent of a campus novel by David Lodge, Helene Uri’s The Best Among Us presents a picture of contemporary life in the Norwegian university scene. If anyone is familiar with this setting, it’s Helene Uri. A linguist and writer, she resigned from her university job several years ago after becoming fed up with the politics and pandering necessary to get ahead in the field. This critique in the guise of a novel focuses on Pål and Nanna, researchers at the prestigious Insitute of Futuristic Linguistics, who are at work on a very large and very important project on how language will look in the future. All goes relatively well until Pål falls for the fifty-year-old professor, Edith Rinkel, whose moral compass points in a dubious direction when it comes to satiating her passion for research. She will go to any length to fulfill her goals and, unfortunately for Pål, she happens to have a penchant for young men. One critic describes The Best Among Us as “a wealth of satirical sketches…and a sparkling source of philological humor in its broadest sense.”
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Helene Uri. Forfatter og språkviter. Om Helene Uri.:
Her novel The Best among Us (Norway's first campus novel) has sold more than 70,000 copies in Norway alone, and was on the national bestselling lists for more than a year. Her latest novel, The righteous, was published in May 2009.
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