the last book I ever read (Linn Ullmann's The Cold Song, excerpt two)

from The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann:

Two years had passed since Milla disappeared and even back then Simen and his bike were as one, that was how he thought of himself, as a boy on wheels, a bike with a body, a heart, and a tongue, and if his parents had let him, he would have taken his bike to bed with him when, much against his will, he was told to go to sleep. From early morning he was out, zooming and skidding and swerving up and down the narrow dirt tracks around the white-painted church or screeched to a halt at the very end of the wooden jetties alongside the ferry wharf, inside the long breakwater; his handlebars flashed in the sunlight and he breathed in the sharp reek of shrimp shells and fish ends from the two fishermen who hadn’t yet called it quits and chosen some other line of work.