Karl Ove Knausgaard

Vanessa Baird

Ingvild Burkey

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.

From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author (Seasons Quartet 1)

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

Vanessa Baird

Praise for Autumn

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Series by Vanessa Baird

Seasons Quartet

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter