One of the Guardian's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, an addictive and searingly honest novel about childhood, family and grief.
Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty. He writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father's death.
When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A profound and mesmerizing work, written as if the author's very life were at stake.
“Powerfully alive . . . Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker (selected as one of the Books of the Year)
"A masterpiece... Meticulously detailed, harrowing, oddly beautiful, its depiction of a family’s disintegration is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I’ve read in years" ― Observer, Books of the Year
"The best book I read this year...full of artistic, moral and technical daring" ― Guardian, Books of the Year
"Intense and vital...ceaselessly compelling...superb" ― New Yorker
"This suburban epic, electrifying in candour and eloquence, feels streets ahead of the comparable Jonathan Franzen" ― Independent, Books of the Year
