Episode 5 Web

Interviews

What is the best translated fiction to read? With Karl Ove Knausgaard

A guide to autofiction – 2

Reading lists

A guide to autofiction

Flat lay of Scandinavian fiction books against textiles.

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10 must-read Scandinavian novels

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Where to start reading Karl Ove Knausgaard

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6 unforgettable fathers in literature

Knausgaard's My Struggle: A reading guide

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Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A reading guide

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Extracts

Father Christmas by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The School of Night

'A damned masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
'An almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life... utterly captivating' Martin MacInnes 
 
London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. 
 
Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows he and his art are destined for more. 
 
Then he meets Hans, an eccentric artist. Hans makes the future Kristian yearns for feel tangible. But success comes at a price. And when Kristian does the unthinkable, will he be prepared to pay it? 
 
'Addictive and eerie' Guardian 
 
‘Engrossing, dark and amusing' Rachel Kushner 
 
'Mysterious, unsettling, thought provoking, unpredictable and darkly entertaining' Colin Barrett 
 
‘Dark and precise about the underside of human desire and connection. . . painfully funny’ Megan Nolan

There is nothing in contemporary publishing to remotely compare to Knausgaard's Morning Star series. Knausgaard has always been brilliant on families and the domestic, on the minutiae of the everyday and the quiet, lonely rituals and habits of personality. But in combining this with elements of genre and even pulp fiction - crime-thriller, horror and the occult - he has unleashed something entirely new, an antic and almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life. There is something obliterative about its intensity; I read hundreds of pages on a bus journey in slow-moving traffic, completely oblivious to everything around me. 
 
The first of the series set in London, The School of Night is by turns bleak, funny and horrifying, but never less than utterly captivating. Knausgaard seems to have struck on an endlessly generative seam, resulting in an almost deranged hypergraphia, and there appears no limit to where he may take us next.

Martin MacInnes, Booker longlisted author of IN ASCENSION

Knausgaard has surpassed even his phenomenally high standards with his latest novel. This dark and macabre offering is incredibly addictive… an intense but hugely rewarding read

Ingenious...engrossing...a remarkable addition to an exciting and disturbing series

Sinister and surreal...A parable of ambition , told with epic heft - and a decent place to start if you've been curious about this writer but never read yet him .

An addictive and eerie reading experience

The School Of Night is another startling, gripping entry in Karl Ove Knausgaard's Morning Star series. I love spending time in this ripe, mysterious, unsettling, thought provoking, unpredictable and darkly entertaining world Knausgaard is in the process of creating.

Colin Barrett, Booker longlisted author of WILD HOUSES

The School of NIght is a good place to start for anyone who hasn't read Knausgaard before

Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of my literary heroes

A deeply strange, polyphonic gothic novel with echoes of Bram Stoker. . . conjures a fictive world that is at once strikingly humane, unsettling, and wholly unique

In Martin Aiken’s translation, the prose is fluent and nimble, the imagery possessed of a steely melancholia

I put this down this book only to eat and sleep. Knausgaard has produced another addictive psychological thriller – by turns exciting, entertaining and tragic

A provocative novel about ambition and morality

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) 
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. 
 
Martin Aitken (Translator) 
Martin Aitken’s translations of Scandinavian fiction are widely published. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the US National Book Awards, among other prizes. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019 and, for the first book in the Morning Star cycle, the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. He lives in Denmark

London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. 
 
Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows he and his art are destined for more. 
 
Then he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist. With Hans, the future Kristian yearns for is tangible. All art is possible. Any line can be crossed. 
 
But success comes at a price. And when Kristian does the unthinkable, will he be prepared to pay it? 
 
Electrifying and unflinching, The School of Night is a singular novel about artistic creation and human corruption. It is the story of one terrible man's rise and fall, and a reckoning with the darkest parts of human nature. 
 
PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
‘Absorbs you utterly’ Sunday Times 
‘One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read’ Brandon Taylor 
‘Addictive’ Daily Telegraph 
‘Brilliant storytelling . . . Epic’ Independent 
‘As accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama’ Spectator 
‘Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive’’ New York Times 
 
 
 
The School of Night is set in the Morning Star universe.

The Third Realm

I still can't get enough...The compulsion to keep reading springs from the author’s ability to transcribe patterns of thinking. His faith that access to other people’s consciousness might make us feel less alone remains a profound — and distinctly literary — conviction

Unsettling, disturbing and riveting... As we become privy to the characters musings on philosophy, religion, art, neuroscience and love, they grow ever more compelling.... as accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama series. There is no writer I would rather devour

Knausgaard is one of the finest writers at work today, and The Third Realm is a deeply strange, polyphonic gothic novel with echoes of Bram Stoker. Blending acute psychological realism with the supernatural, it conjures a fictive world that is at once strikingly humane, unsettling, and wholly unique

Breathtaking...The book opens and closes with Tove…her mix of despair and insight, humour and visionary brilliance turns out to be what these novels need most… [The Third Realm] has such an electrifyingly capacious sense of what the novel can be

One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. Novel by novel, Knausgaard is replenishing some feral charge to the world. This book made me afraid of the dark again.

Intense… The presence of a detective investigating a ritual murder injects surprising pace, while distinctive meditations on mortality, the divine and mental illness prove enthralling

If you love Knausgaard…you’ll devour The Third Realm… it’s ferociously readable… I still can’t get enough

A visionary epic... an exemplary masterclass in what fiction can offer

The Third Realm… is primarily a meditation on the ordinary… compelling… At every turn…we see Knausgaard’s relish in depicting the unreliability of people’s thoughts

Readers who come to this book first will find an entertaining story about people sorting through spiritual, domestic, and emotional confusion. But those who’ve read the prior novels will get a deeper sense of just how fascinating, frustrating, and unknowable we can be to each other, and the consequences of that disconnection.

[In] The Third Realm… Knausgaard unspools a philosophical cop drama shot through with shivery horror… In 2018 he said he’d been binge-watching Twin Peaks. No surprise that that show’s eerie tonal swerves are exquisitely channelled here

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Knausgaard has delivered yet another complicated, chilling and vastly enjoyable novel of ideas that poses more questions than answers

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken’s translations of Scandinavian fiction are widely published. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the US National Book Awards, among other prizes. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019 and, for the first book in the Morning Star cycle, the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. He lives in Denmark

'Strikingly humane, unsettling, and wholly unique' Ferdia Lennon 
 
‘Ferociously readable. . . I still can't get enough' The Times 
 
If no one ever died, what would happen then? 
 
For several days, a bright new star in the sky above Norway has blazed over the restless lives of those below. Tove, an artist, is consumed by intense creativity as she spirals towards psychosis. Line falls in love with a musician named Valdemar and is lured to a secret black metal gig in a remote forest. Geir, a policeman, is investigating a ritual murder but chances upon something more horrifying even than the bodies in the trees – the last bodies he sees, because, as undertaker Syvert is the first to realise, people have stopped dying since the star appeared. 
 
What is haunting the world – and why? 
As profound as it is thrilling, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm is a breathtaking novel about ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change. 
 
PRAISE FOR THE THIRD REALM 
 
‘A visionary epic' Guardian 
 
‘One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. . . This book made me afraid of the dark again.’ Brandon Taylor, Washington Post 
 
‘As accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama series. There is no writer I would rather devour’ Spectator 
PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
'Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of my literary heroes' Torrey Peters 
 
'Addictive' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling' New York Times 
 
‘Casts an existential spell. . . captivating' Financial Times

The Wolves of Eternity

Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.

[An] enormously compelling book… The range of subjects The Wolves of Eternity explores is fascinating

Casts an existential spell…captivating… Big themes — the cosmos, death and resurrection — are amplified through ghostly visitations, doppelgänger lives and the question of what, if anything, lies beyond human existence

The nature and possibility of immortality is a recurring theme, and digressions abound — communicating trees, broken families, Chernobyl, death, etc. But by sticking close to his characters, Knausgaard addresses those heady topics with an easy-going grace

Compulsively readable...Knausgaard remains one of the great chroniclers of the moment-by-moment experience of life

Immersive… It is so engrossing and entertaining that I crammed in its 800 pages like a glutton devouring a box of chocolates

Knausgaard, master of fiction as an inquiry into the self, now revives fiction as an inquiry into the cosmos, re-enchanting the latter with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it

I read The Morning Star compulsively, and stayed awake all night after finishing it.

The future is no more, and eternity has begun. 
 
It's 1986 and a nuclear reactor has exploded in Chernobyl. Syvert Løyning returns home from military service to live with his mother and brother on the outskirts of a town in Southern Norway. One night, he dreams of his late father, and can't shake him from his mind. Searching through his father's belongings for clues and connections, he finds a cache of letters that lead to the Soviet Union. 
 
In present-day Russia, Alevtina is trying to balance work and family. She has always sought the answers to life's big questions, but is preoccupied with care of her young son. Her friend Vasilisa offers some nourishment: she is writing a book about an ancient feature of Russian culture, the belief in eternal life. Meantime, Alevtina is heading towards a meeting that will redraw the contours of her world. 
 
A searching and humane novel, The Wolves of Eternity is an intimate journey into the experiences of a half-brother and half-sister in their two different - yet deeply connected - lives. The second novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard's extraordinary new series, it expands the universe of The Morning Star in the decades before the blazing and mysterious star descends. 
 
The Wolves of Eternity is set in the Morning Star universe 
 
PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
'Knausgaard, master of fiction as an inquiry into the self, now revives fiction as an inquiry into the cosmos'' Guardian 
 
'Enormously compelling… The range of subjects The Wolves of Eternity explores is fascinating' Sunday Times 
 
'Compelling' Daily Telegraph **** 
 
'Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive' New York Times

The Morning Star

The compulsive new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author

Experience a major new literary universe in the making 
 
'I read The Morning Star compulsively and stayed awake all night after finishing it' Brandon Taylor 
 
Nine lives will be forever changed . . . 
One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a nightshift when one of her patients escapes. 
 
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky, and so begins a series of mysterious events. For these six, and three others, life is about to become ever more surprising and unruly... 
 
'Brilliant storytelling' Independent 
 
'Addictive' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Captivating' Observer 
 
The Morning Star is set in the Morning Star universe

Nine lives will be changed forever in the exhilarating new novel from the international bestseller. 
 
'Addictive' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling' New York Times 
 
One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a nightshift when one of her patients escapes. 
 
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky, and so begins a series of mysterious events. For these six, and three others, life is about to become ever more surprising and unruly... 
 
'I read The Morning Star compulsively, and stayed awake all night after finishing it' Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life 
 
'Brilliant storytelling... Epic' Independent 
 
'Captivating' Observer

Essays

In the Land of the Cyclops

A profound (and profoundly eclectic) collection of essays

A modern Roland Barthes... Knausgaard has a gift for stopping the reader in their tracks with an unexpected, casual profundity

A brilliantly wide-ranging essay collection from the author of My Struggle, spanning literature, philosophy, art and how our daily and creative lives intertwine. 
 
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English, and these brilliant and wide-ranging pieces meditate on themes familiar from his groundbreaking fiction. 
 
Here, Knausgaard discusses Madame Bovary, the Northern Lights, Ingmar Bergman, and the work of an array of writers and visual artists, including Knut Hamsun, Michel Houellebecq, Anselm Kiefer and Cindy Sherman. 
 
These essays beautifully capture Knausgaard's ability to mediate between the deeply personal and the universal, demonstrating his trademark self-scrutiny and his deep longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world. 
 
'Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive' New York Times

Summer

Knausgaard Seasons Quartet Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Summer is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter, with stunning artwork by Anselm Kiefer.

[Knausgaard is] endlessly curious about the world… [and] his perceptions of it are so particular.

[Knausgaard] brings it all alive in his prose, makes it shimmer. Whether intellectually parsing for meaning or playing this existential video game of political turmoil, horror, and heartache, his writing flows easily from quiet, thoughtful engagement to ecstatic communion with the world… He may be done with this quartet, the My Struggle series, and autofiction altogether, but I still want more of it. That kind of passionate literary intimacy is rare.

Engrossing… Knausgaard’s prose evokes universal themes from intimate specifics.

Knausgaard closes his quartet of autobiographical meditations on the seasons in an appropriately verdant and optimistic fashion. . . While interrogating the nature of storytelling, he’s priming readers for a powerful, straightforward yarn. Breezy reading that’s also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. Anselm Kiefer (Illustrator) Anselm Kiefer’s body of work comprises paintings, sculptures, installations, artist books, and works on paper such as watercolours, woodcuts, collages, and photographs. Fusing art and literature, Kiefer engages taboo and controversial issues from recent history as well as the ancient myth of life, death, and the cosmos. He brings to light the importance of the sacred and spiritual, myth and memory.

Summer is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter, with stunning artwork by Anselm Kiefer. 
 
'Knausgaard unearths the mysteries of the commonplace' Observer 
 
 In Summer, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about long days full of sunlight, eating ice cream with his children, lawn sprinklers and ladybirds. He experiments with the beginnings of a novel and keeps a diary in which the small events of his family's life are recorded. Against a canvas of memories, longings, and experiences of art and literature, he searches for the meaning of moments as they pass us by. 
 
'Wondrous... There are blissful glimpses of nature's mystery and balance' Financial Times

(Seasons Quartet 3)

Spring

Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles, beautifully illustrated by Anna Bjerger.

Entirely ingenious. Knausgaard isn’t afraid to be gauche, anxious, vulgar, inconsistent, portentous, sentimental. He makes virtues of what, in literary novels, are often counted faults. And he makes them moving.

Spring features Knausgaard unbound. . . the book’s blunt, unforced telling brings the larger project’s meaning into sudden, brilliant focus… Knausgaard has assembled this living encyclopedia for his daughter with a wild and desperate sort of love, as a way to forge her attachment to the world, to fasten her to it... Fall in love with the world, he enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it.

Heavy but not heavy-handed, this true noir of the North is dark, bleak and moody. This story about life that’s set over the course of single day will move and disturb in equal measure.

An unexpected treat… A lovely piece of work.

Oodles of musing on life and art that’s by turns meandering and electrifying.

[Karl Ove Knausgaard] observes a subject so closely, mining so far into its essence – its quiddity – that the observations transcend banality and become compelling.

For anyone who is curious about this writer... Spring makes for an excellent introduction. It is the shortest book he has ever written, but it is all muscle, a generous slice of a thoughtful, ruminative life.

If you still haven’t tried Knausgaard... try Spring. It’s poignant and beautiful… you’ll get him and get why some of us have gone crazy for him.

A radical, thrilling departure from the first two volumes of his Seasons Quartet... this moving novel stylistically resembles his acclaimed My Struggle series... A remarkably honest take on the strange linkages between love, loss, laughter, and self-destruction, a perfect distillation of Knausgaard’s unique gifts.

Knausgaard’s assets are on full display, including his precise writing style and his unerring sense of detail … it is all muscle, a generous slice of thoughtful, ruminative life.

The curiously loose weave of Knausgaard’s prose allows it to return parts of the reader’s own life to them

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. Anna Bjerger (Illustrator) Anna Bjerger was born in 1973 and is a Swedish artist who lives and works outside Älmhult in Småland, Sweden. She was educated at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London and has exhibited regularly in Sweden and internationally since the early 2000s.

Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles, beautifully illustrated by Anna Bjerger. 
 
'Moving... A circadian novel, set over one day... Entirely ingenious' Daily Telegraph 
 
Spring follows a father and his newborn daughter through one day in April, from sunrise to sunset. It is a day filled with the small joys of family life, but also its deep struggles. With this striking novel in the Seasons quartet, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects uncompromisingly on life's darkest moments and what can sustain us through them. 
 
'Fall in love with the world, Knausgaard enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it' New York Times

Winter

From global literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard, an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and love letters addressed directly to Knausgaard’s unborn daughter

The second volume of his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons is even more beautiful than the first... Hauntingly translated by Ingvild Burkey, Winter will reward every curious reader. Insightful, giddy and full of energy, Knausgaard's memoir throbs with the miraculous imminence of new life and the thrill of just being.

When Knausgaard exposes himself in the manner of his autobiographical novel My Struggle... it’s interesting enough. But he becomes more charming and persuasive when he wanders into quizzical speculation – about, say, why coffins don’t have windows or how sex is like cannibalism.

The author casts the world in a holy glow of surprise and compassion… A winningly interior journey into the most interior of seasons.

It sounds mad, and often is, but it’s also sweet, funny and brimful of wide-eyed seasonal wonder.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. Lars Lerin (Illustrator) Lars Lerin, born in Sweden, is considered to be Scandinavia’s leading watercolourist, and his art is displayed in museums worldwide, including the Sandgrund museum, which is dedicated exclusively to his work. He has also published over fifty books, including Naturlära, winner of the 2014 August Prize. In 2016 he was honoured by the King of Sweden with the Royal Medal Litteris et Artibus.

From global literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard, an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and love letters addressed directly to Knausgaard’s unborn daughter 
 
In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as the birth of his daughter draws near. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it anew. While new life is on the horizon, the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about everything from the moon, winter boots and messiness, to owls and birthdays. Taking nothing for granted, he fills these everyday familiar objects and ideas with new meaning. 
 
Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.

Festive Tales for a Nordic Noël

A Scandinavian Christmas

Ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to Karl Ove Knausgaard, have yourself a nordic noel with the very best Scandinavian Christmas tales 
 
Have yourself a truly Scandinavian Christmas... Of visions and prophesies seen in dark, dark woods. Of toys and trees come to life. Of trolls raising chaos, and of families torn apart -- only to be brought back together by festive cheer. 
 
In this collection, classic tales from Hans Christian Andersen and Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlof blend with modern day stories from Karl Ove Knausgaard and Vigdis Hjorth. Each touch on the warm and wild spirit of Christmas, where the cosiness and contentment of the season can often give way to the unexpected, magical and sometimes mystical. 
 
A smorgasbord of strange literary gifts, let A Scandinavian Christmas transport you to a winter wonderland in which fantasy, the fantastic and the festive combine for your reading delight. 
 
'These evocative, atmospheric tales...capture the spirit of Christmas' Sunday Express

These evocative, atmospheric tales...capture the spirit of Christmas

Sunday Express, *Christmas Gift Guide 2021*

A strange and beguiling series of stories, penned Scandinavia's literary greats, spanning three centuries... Beautifully decorated, this is a hardback any household would be proud to have adorn their coffee table

A hygge Christmas is assured with these folksy traditional and modern stories... Best enjoyed with a steaming glass of glögg

Saga Magazine, *Christmas Gift Guide 2021*

A gorgeous collection of classic tales from everyone from Hans Christian Anderson to Karl Ove Knausgaard. Magical tales of winter wonderlands of dark woods, you'll love this smorgasbord of festive short stories!

Hans Christian Andersen (Author) Hans Christian Andersen (April 2, 1805 - August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet, most famous for his fairy tales. Among his best-known stories are The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, The Little Match Girl, The Ugly Duckling and The Red Shoes. During Andersen's lifetime he was feted by royalty and acclaimed for having brought joy to children across Europe. His fairy tales have been translated into over 150 languages and continue to be published in millions of copies all over the world. Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. Selma Lagerlöf (Author) Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was a teacher in a girls' secondary school before she became a full-time writer. She is known around the world for her classic children's book The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson and she was the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in 1909.

Ranging from Hans Christian Anderson to Karl Ove Knausgaard, have yourself a nordic noel with the very best Scandinavian Christmas tales 
 
Have yourself a truly Scandinavian Christmas... Of visions and prophesies seen in dark, dark woods. Of toys and trees come to life. Of trolls raising chaos, and of families torn apart -- only to be brought back together by festive cheer. 
 
In this collection, classic tales from Hans Christian Andersen and Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlof blend with modern day stories from Karl Ove Knausgaard and Vigdis Hjorth. Each touch on the warm and wild spirit of Christmas, where the cosiness and contentment of the season can often give way to the unexpected, magical and sometimes mystical. 
 
A smorgasbord of strange literary gifts, let A Scandinavian Christmas transport you to a winter wonderland in which fantasy, the fantastic and the festive combine for your reading delight. 
 
'These evocative, atmospheric tales...capture the spirit of Christmas' Sunday Express

From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author (Seasons Quartet 1)

Autumn

From global literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard, a love letter about the world written in short dazzling pieces – by a father to his unborn daughter

Diverse and delightful… These sharp little essays capture the wonder of things with photographic immediacy… This is an inspiring, surprising collection

Brilliantly conveys the sense you get, as a prospective parent, that the world is brand new… It’s all beautifully done.

In Autumn, a lyrical cabaret beside the grand opera of the My Struggle books, taboo memories and forbidden feelings disrupt the grown-up project of a compendium of fatherly wisdom... Autumn glows with a radiant attachment to 'the world, as it is'... From sunshine to head-lice, it celebrates the 'dizzying intensity of being'.

Quietly illuminates Knausgaard's profound gift for making the reader see the world in fresh and unpredictable ways.

This book is full of wonders… Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard’s patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted.

Autumn… returns to the scintillating tangent that characterized the early volumes of My Struggle, when he still allowed his midlife self airtime. On each subject [Knausgaard] combines an almost comically microscopic focus with a stealthy flair for producing a bigger picture that is all the more arresting for arriving by surprise.

It is when elements of autobiography creep in that the book comes most alive, as when he writes about choosing his father’s wellington boots as a memento after his death.

Knausgaard writes about the textures of ordinariness with a microscopic focus that’s both wondrous and absurd… There are blissful glimpses of nature’s mystery and balance.

Having given us his saga of experience, these are Knausgaard’s Songs of Innocence… The tension for the reader lies in watching the author navigate his way from the banal into the celestial otherness of the thing he is encountering… Knausgaard sees the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.

…the modest ambitions of Autumn - ‘to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap’ - add up to a phenomenological rescue mission, one the writer undertakes on behalf of his daughter, but also of himself and his reader. Day by day, radiantly, the mission succeeds.

There are gorgeous, poetic observations on almost every page.

Knausgaard’s sentences, as long as waves, use the plainest, least literary language. You paddle out unsuspecting. This is easy, you think, striking out. But Knausgaard writes by undertow. Turn round and you are alone, far out in the drowning solitudes… It is truly hopeful and this, for Knausgaard, is a departure.

Taking the old repetitive elements of life, Knausgaard’s detailed observations open our eyes to their unexpected yet remarkable qualities.

In these secular meditations, Knausgaard scratches away at the ordinary to reach the sublime – finding what’s in the picture, and what’s hidden

Knausgaard is an acute, sometimes squirmingly honest analyst of domesticity and his relationship to his family.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes the Seasons Quartet and the Morning Star sequence (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm and The School of Night) is published in thirty-six languages. Vanessa Baird (Illustrator) Vanessa Baird (1963) was born in Oslo, where she now lives and works. She has an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, and in 2015 she won the Lorck Schive Art Prize, Norway’s biggest contemporary art prize.

The Sunday Times bestseller from literary phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard, a love letter about the world written by a father to his unborn daughter. 
 
'Inspiring, surprising... Autumn will warm and enlighten anyone who opens their eyes to it' The Times 
 
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece each day, describing the material and natural world - from twilight to the migration of birds, from Van Gogh to forgiveness - with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. 
 
With artwork by Vanessa Baird 
 
'This book is full of wonders... The world feels repainted' New York Times

My Struggle Book 2

A Man in Love

An electrifying story about love and new life from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Knausgaard…is a master of capturing the mundane. By paying particular attention to the minutia which makes up a life, he awards it the respect it deserves… unputdownable

A stunningly eloquent set of reflections on masculinity, domesticity and the artist's itch to escape

Compelling, rewarding, maddening...breathtaking

My favourite book of the year… He has the ability to make the small details of his life fascinating

This is a reading experience like no other. Fearless in its truth-telling and as real as life, it is an epic study of what it feels like to be alive

An electrifying story about love and new life from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 
 
 
This is a book about leaving your wife and everything you know. 
 
It is about fresh starts, about love, about friendship. It is also about the earth-shattering experience of becoming a father, the mundane struggles of family life, ridiculously unsuccessful holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes, fights with quarrelsome neighbours, the emotional strains of childrens' birthday parties and pushing a pram around Stockholm when all you really want to do is write. 
 
This is a book about one man's life but, somehow, about everyone else's too. 
 
'Compelling, rewarding...breathtaking' Observer

My Struggle Book 6

The End

The extraordinary final volume of ‘the most significant literary enterprise of our times’ (Guardian)

For all its complexity, My Struggle achieves something pretty simple, the thing that enduring fiction has always done: it creates a world that absorbs you utterly… The End is alive.

Knausgaard’s rendering of this crisis – the jitteriness, the relentlessness with which he goes over events again and again, his overwhelming sense of transgression and shame – is riveting… Every changed nappy, every cigarette smoked on the balcony, every cup of coffee poured from that damn vacuum jug is another alibi; the creation of the normal life that distracts from the roiling mess within... That we cannot quite name what we’ve experienced is part of the brilliance.

The End is woven of a man’s love for his family and his obsession with the solitary writing life, the warp and weft of these contradictory passions sometimes meshing together perfectly… My Struggle is a cultural moment worth getting involved in. The six volumes offer something special: total immersion in the soap opera of another person’s life.

A uniquely compelling and absorbing reading experience… captivating interplay between banality and beauty, the redundant and the sublime.

Compulsively addictive… His way of describing “reality as it is” is to expand the range of thoughts and actions, however mundane or shameful, that a human being will publicly admit to.

This central tension, between the needs of the artist and the need of the husband and father, one that has coursed through My Struggle’s thousands of pages, Knausgaard appears to bring to a moving, wholly fitting resolution… its totality, its absolute commitment to its own ideals, make it – and the whole sequence – a mesmerising, thought-provoking and genuinely important work of art.

A daring end to a brilliant series... I will read this series again and again.

It is hard not to be impressed by the fluency and erudition on display as Knausgaard charts his course through history, philosophy, literature and the visual arts… In the end, reality does not break down under Knausgaard’s gaze. We are left instead with the world as it is: the click of a seatbelt, the shock of melted margarine, the centuries slipping away in Rembrandt’s eyes.

The inner conflicts swirling around exert a gravitational pull on the reader, the challenges of empathy becoming universal through their particularity. Over and over, he asserts something fundamental to literature, art and life… these books will endure.

My Struggle just keeps coming at you, much as life does… Knausgaard succeeds in producing prose that is "alive", partly because of his eye for detail and partly because of the quality of his intellect.

[My Struggle] is arguably the most important literary event of the 21st century...it’s also worth reflecting on just how valuable these books can be. They are, among other things, uniquely candid about male shame, which makes them a highly valuable guide to modern masculinity.

The End is worth the wait… his life is now destined to stand in the shadow of this truly monumental six-volume literary achievement. And perhaps there is no greater mark of artistic success than that.

The “unartiness” is the most striking element of Knausgaard’s project. The impression of randomness and spontaneity… Knausgaard’s abandonment of fictional convention was particularly disruptive because he executed it in a realm where the strictures of artifice are most rigidly codified: domestic realism… Enthralling… The final passages of My Struggle are guilt-ridden and heartbreaking.

[The End] has a bone-dry wit, a certain knowingness about the project’s grandiose archetypes… [Knausgaard] laments the gulf between vaulting ambition and its haphazard realisation.

From the international phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard, the extraordinary final volume of 'the most significant literary enterprise of our times' (Guardian). 
 
In this final novel in the My Struggle cycle, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines life, death, love and literature with unsparing rigour and begins to count the cost of his project. 
 
The End reflects on the fallout from the earlier books, with Knausgaard facing the pressures of literary acclaim and its often shattering repercussions. It is at once a meditation on writing and its relationship with reality, and an account of a writer's relationship with himself - from his ambitions to his doubts and frailties. 
 
'Epic... It creates a world that absorbs you utterly' 
Sunday Times 
 
'Compulsively addictive' 
Daily Telegraph 
 
'My Struggle has strong claim to be the great literary event of the twenty-first century' 
Guardian 
 
'A mesmerising, thought-provoking and genuinely important work of art' 
Spectator

My Struggle Book 5

Some Rain Must Fall

An exhilarating story of ambition, joy and failure in early manhood from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Bracing, maddening and utterly compelling

Tremendous, maddening, addictive, gripping

It is a pen-and-paper virtual reality; after reading it you feel that another past has been downloaded into your mind

Breathtaking... Knausgaard has a rare talent for making everyday life seem fascinating

For Knausgaard's obsessive fans, this cycle is the most exciting literary project of our times... Knausgaard is the most humane writer in the world… He writes beautifully… It is precisely in the commonness of the lovingly recorded details that these books spin their magic

Raw, fast, improvisatory, unfettered. It’s addictive high-wire writing in which he unflinchingly reveals everything about himself

[Some Rain Must Fall] is Knausgaard at his best… It’s a rare novelist who writes about student bars and the Happy Mondays at the same time as yearning for spiritual salvation

Part of Knausgaard’s appeal is believability: his books may be called novels but we read them as memoirs. The meticulous detail seems to guarantee their authenticity… Childhood, sex, love, art, work and death are there too, writ small from his own perspective, but compellingly observed

Reverberates with life’s core questions… In its depiction of the torment of writer’s block and a young adult’s struggle to construct a sense of self, both on and off the page, it is brilliant

An exhilarating story of ambition, joy and failure in early manhood from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 
 
As the youngest student to be admitted to Bergen's prestigious Writing Academy, Karl Ove arrives full of excitement and writerly aspirations. Soon though, he is stripped of his youthful illusions. His writing is revealed to be puerile and clichéd, and his social efforts are a dismal failure. He drowns his shame in drink and rock music. 
 
Then, little by little, things begin to change. He falls in love, gives up writing and the beginnings of an adult life take shape. That is, until his self-destructive binges and the irresistible lure of the writer's struggle pull him back. 
 
'Breathtaking... Knausgaard has a rare talent for making everyday life seem fascinating' 
The Times

My Struggle Book 4

Dancing in the Dark

A beautiful, funny, vital novel of teenage years and teenage mistakes from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Fires every nerve ending while summoning in the reader the sheer sense of how amazing it is to be alive

A beautiful, funny, vital novel of teenage years and teenage mistakes from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 
 
Fresh out of high school, Karl Ove moves to a remote fishing village to work as a teacher. He has no interest in the job itself - or in any other job for that matter, his sole aim is to save money and start writing. 
 
All goes well to begin with but as the nights grow longer, his life takes a darker turn. Drinking causes him blackouts, his repeated attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation, and to his own great distress he develops romantic feelings towards one of his 13-year-old students. And all the while the shadow of his father looms large. 
 
'Beautifully human... Being drawn into Knausgaard's world is an ineluctable pleasure' 
The Times

My Struggle Book 3

Boyhood Island

An irresistible story of childhood adventure from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart visible

Knausgaard finds the sublime in the everyday... Boyhood Island reverberates with the joys and anxieties of early youth, and Knausgaard brilliantly recreates their exaggerated feel

Compelling and addictive... One of the most grown-up works of fiction we have

Powerfully hypnotic and addictive… a Norwegian Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

My Struggle is already the most significant literary achievement of the 21st century and we still have three volumes to go

Knausgaard's Proustian attention to detail and scrupulous analysis of emotional nuance is almost maddening – but ultimately magnificent

One of the most anticipated books of the year (the decade)

His devotees gobble each new volume with an eagerness previously reserved only for box sets of Borgen

Knausgaard transforms the personal and mundane into the universal and perennially significant... There is such depth of feeling beneath the vibrant exterior, such sense of the goodness present in human existence

Accessibly and punchily written, an intimate, determined and ultimately successful attempt to shape the tiny mundanities of life into something quite unexpectedly beautiful, compelling and substantial

Knausgaard is a writer strong enough to survive the hype... A masterpiece for the age of the selfie... Brutally frank about the frustrations of marriage, work and parenthood, it's often horrifying and deeply funny

Astounding... A work of such sincerity that, to paraphrase Baudelaire, the paper shrivels and flares at the touch of his fiery pen

Free-form, fear-filled, densely descriptive…Norway’s biggest literary star since Ibsen… [Knausgaard] has no obvious superiors among the writers now available to an English-reading public

An irresistible story of childhood adventure from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 
 
Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father. 
 
In the now infamously direct style of the My Struggle cycle, Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrated. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be. 
 
'Knausgaard finds the sublime in the everyday... Boyhood Island reverberates with the joys and anxieties of early youth, and Knausgaard brilliantly recreates their exaggerated feel' 
Times Literary Supplement

My Struggle Book 1

A Death in the Family

An addictive and searingly honest novel about childhood and grief from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Praise for Arendal

A joy to read

Knausgaard masterfully depicts the outer surroundings of a dark and frozen city down to the smallest detail, while at the same time luring the reader inward into a far more obscure landscape... Arendal has go ...

Disturbing and obsessive

A joy to read

Knausgaard masterfully depicts the outer surroundings of a dark and frozen city down to the smallest detail, while at the same time luring the reader inward into a far more obscure landscape... Arendal has go ...

Disturbing and obsessive

A joy to read

Knausgaard masterfully depicts the outer surroundings of a dark and frozen city down to the smallest detail, while at the same time luring the reader inward into a far more obscure landscape... Arendal has go ...

Disturbing and obsessive

Books by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle6 Books

Seasons Quartet4 Books

Vintage Christmas Tales4 Books

Articles featuring Karl Ove Knausgaard

What is the best translated fiction to read? With Karl Ove Knausgaard

A guide to autofiction

10 must-read Scandinavian novels

Where to start reading Karl Ove Knausgaard

6 unforgettable fathers in literature

Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A reading guide

Father Christmas by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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