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The School of Night

byKarl Ove Knausgaard, Martin Aitken (Translator)

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'[An] almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life. . . by turns bleak, funny and horrifying, but never less than utterly captivating' Martin MacInnes, Booker longlisted author of IN ASCENSION

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.

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

About Karl Ove Knausgaard

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.
Details
  • Imprint: Harvill
  • ISBN: 9781787304208
  • Length: 512 pages
  • Price: £25.00
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