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Spring

Spring

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

I have just finished writing this book for you. What happened that summer nearly three years ago, and its repercussions, are long since over. Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for.

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.

Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard’s famously pensive and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicentre of this singular literary series.

Reviews

  • 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.

    Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph

  • 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.

    The New York Times

  • 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.

    Monocle

  • An unexpected treat… A lovely piece of work.

    Sunday Telegraph

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

    Anthony Cummins, Metro

More in this Series

About the Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard

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 Out of the World, A Time for Everything and the Seasons Quartet, is published in thirty-five languages.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Anna Bjerger

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.

Anna Bjerger

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Extracts

Father Christmas by Karl Over Knausgaard

Father Christmas is an extract from Winter, Knausgaard's collection of short essays on the wonders of life. Translated from Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey and illustrated by Lars Lerin, it's perfect for a winter night in

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