The Odyssey

Birger Emanuelsen

A powerful and tender father-son novel about memory, caregiving and a final promise written by award-winning literary powerhouse Birger Emanuelsen

When a father slips into dementia, his son takes him to the family cabin on the far edge of the sea — a small, weather-beaten place with no electricity, no running water, and the last traces of a life long gone. This is where the father once wished to go when the diagnosis came. And this is where the son believes he might still catch a final glimpse of the man who raised him.

No one thinks the trip is a good idea. But a promise is a promise, and each night, they read Homer’s Odyssey aloud, the ancient tale echoing their own muted search. As Odysseus fights to
return home and Telemachus tries to understand a father he barely knows, this son searches for the man slipping away before his eyes.

Not a story of grand revelations, but of small, devestating recognitions, The Odyssey is written with clarity, restraint and an understated humour. Exploring guilt, duty, masculinity and love, Emanuelsen quietly questions how we care for the old, beyond the systems that we’ve shaped and built.

The Odyssey is a tender, unsentimental portrait of dignity at the end of life and of a son stepping into the role of parent to his own father. A quiet, deeply resonant novel about the slow unraveling of memory, the weight of promises, and the fragile bond that remains when everything else begins to fall away.