Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.

Trond Sander is the protagonist of the novel and its first-person narrator. In the present-tense narrative, he is a 67-year-old man who has sold his firm to buy a decrepit cabin in the woods that he aims to spend the rest of his life fixing up. In the past-tense narrative, he is a 15-year-old boy just beginning to understand the adult world during a summer with his father. Trond’s decision to return to almost the exact same setting where the events of 1948 occurred demonstrates a desire to orient his life in the context of those events and to seek out a closeness with his father that has been missing since he disappeared. Because of the first-person narrative, all impressions of the novel’s other characters are filtered through his view.

At 67, Trond is cagey with the details of his adult life. He notes his first marriage and divorce with little emotion; the most detailed account of the car accident that killed his second wife comes in his description of a photograph that ran in the news, something he can only look at secondhand.