There are some who say in the age of social media and textspeak that the art of the written word is dead. For Croatian-Norwegian writer Oliver Lovrenski, however, that short-form communication becomes a tool.

His debut novel, Back In The Day, garnered awards when published in Norway in 2025 and now comes to the English market in a translation by Nichola Smalley.

In reality, the term novel is somewhat misleading, running at just 248 pages, many of them no more than six lines long. Back In The Day is more a short story, a musing of thoughts, than a traditional novel.

It’s not just the brevity that challenges form, devoid of capitalisation and punctuation, the phone text format prevails and while initially novel, it soon becomes little more than a gimmick.

What plot there is follows Ivor, an immigrant in Oslo, drawn into the darker underworld of drug dealers and gang life. It’s a side of Oslo that’s not often portrayed on the page, the Norwegian capital usually painted in the rose-tinted view of a thriving, wealthy society, the model for the perfect urban utopia. As anyone who has visited Oslo, or in fact any major city, will know, though, behind any polished corporate glitz, there are numerous backstreets offering a grittier view of life.

His snippets of text, delivered by Lovrenski in almost diary form typed into his phone, show a world where love, loyalty, and ultimately life is lost on the streets. Gang loyalties shift with the season; drug deals go dangerously wrong; and what hopes he had of pursuing a career in law evaporate faster than his so-called friends when the police arrive.

It is an ambitious approach and there are snippets that genuinely grab the reader’s attention; sadly, though, the non-linear, fractured style of this prose makes it harder to fully engage with Ivor or the world he describes. Limited to snatched fragments of conscious download, we struggle to see the bigger picture, just become engaged in a thought process when it’s thrown to the wind and a new, seemingly random, thought is thrown into the mix.

Perhaps it’s a deliberate technique to delve into the troubled mind of a man increasingly using drugs to numb his mind against the darkness around him, but if that is the intention, it’s not an entirely satisfactory technique.

Award judges in Norway praised the work for its originality, and yes, Back In The Day is unlike more traditional novels. If, however, it’s meant to be the breakthrough link between textspeak and the conventional novel – a book for the WhatsApp generation – that claim is more questionable.

Lovrenski clearly has lots to say as a storyteller. It will be interesting to see if future works take a more conventional approach and whether that’s a more successful route.

Back In The Day by Oliver Lovrenski, translated by Nichola Smalley is published by Hamish Hamilton