Eva lives an apparently normal, recognisable and good life. As seen form the outside, there is no cause for concern. Then one day she has a panic attack on the bathroom floor. For no reason she can understand, fear enters her body. She avoids her usual company, preferring to sit in solitude in her room or run lap after solitary lap around the stadium at Bislett, strengthening her body, taking care of herself to avoid death. She could die at any time. People are dying all the time, without warning, at any age. So why not Eva?
You're Not Dying is both a very small and an almost infinitely big novel – on how an often inexplicable and apparently needless anxiety can afflict us. It can make us avoid what we used to seek. We understand something basically horrible: Being ourselves does not happen automatically. We have to fight for it, usually while nobody is looking. But it is also a story of surviving the struggle, and of friends who don't stop calling even though you never ring back.
(...) a hopeful book about anxiety.
KLASSEKAMPEN
Maybe one could say that Strømsborgs authorship is moving in a more serious direction with this book, but there is still something unmistakably Strømsborgesque with this novel that portrays the circumstances of a no longer quite so young, anxious woman in an essentially questioning and wondering way, with a hint of misery, melancholy, a sense of lost time, life passing you by, while you're sitting alone in an empty room, like Demi Moore in St. Elmos Fire, just being scared.
STAVANGER AFTENBLAD
(...) a strong, beautiful and vivid novel.
VÅRT LAND