Astrid Solberg

Dr. Astrid Solberg is a maritime historian at the University of Oslo, specialising in the North Sea trade network from 1550 to 1650, and she has been meaning to visit her great-aunt Margit in Bergen for two years. She has not visited. The month has not quite arranged itself. Then Margit dies on a Tuesday, and Astrid takes the seven-hour train journey west for the funeral and the reading of the will. The inheritance is not what she expected. Bryggen Books—the family bookshop that Margit ran for forty years, the shop Astrid grew up in while her mother worked—has been left in equal shares to two people. One is Astrid. The other is Erik Haugen, the shop's current manager. Neither of them wanted this. *The Bergen Agreement* is literary fiction about inheritance, bookshops, and the question of what we owe the places we came from. It follows Astrid as she navigates the legal structure of a shared inheritance, the history of a shop she has been away from for sixteen years, and the question of what Margit actually intended by binding two people together in the ownership of something she loved. The novel unfolds across twenty chapters—each one building on the agreement, the inventory, the arguments that clear, and the conversation that keeps going—following Astrid and Erik through an autumn and winter in Bergen as they figure out whether the bookshop can survive being owned by two people who have very different ideas about what it's for. Astrid is not a conventional romance protagonist. She is deliberate, analytical, a person who approaches problems by organising them, by understanding the structure, by refusing to let emotion override calculation. She has a desk in Oslo that she classifies as organised complexity, a career she cares about, and a life that does not include running a bookshop in the city she left at eighteen and never came back to. Erik is not a wounded hero. He is a man who has been running Bryggen Books for seven years, who loves it in the specific way of pe