Habitat

Habitat follows seven people over the course of a week as their mid-century apartment building in Oslo inexplicably disappears. The web of neighbours is connected by family relations, long acquaintance, life-long feuds, and glimpses of each other across the communal garden. As they are each affected in different ways, they fail to grasp that this is a shared crisis. The neighbours, in turn, blame and reach out to each other, never seeing the full picture. Their age, profession, origin, and family status all affect how they respond to the crisis in their own apartment, and to what extent help and understanding is available to them. The building components give their own take on being used for the purposes of these people, their voices containing the longer perspective of materials that existed before the building, and which will survive in some form beyond its destruction. This striking debut novel from one of Ireland's most promising emerging talents examines the evasive responses of these neighbours, their troubles and short-comings, and the lies they tell each other and themselves. Comparable to Kafka's Metamorphosis or Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros in how people respond to an uncanny event, Shine has here written a parable perfectly fit for our uncertain times.