Flat lay of Scandinavian fiction books against textiles.

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Reading lists

10 must-read Scandinavian novels

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Where to start with 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 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

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 series (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity and The Third Realm) is published in thirty-five languages. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken has translated the works of many Scandinavian writers, among them Karl Ove Knausgaard, Helle Helle, Hanne Ørstavik and Olga Ravn. He lives in Denmark.

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 series (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity and The Third Realm) is published in thirty-five 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

From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author (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 series (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity and The Third Realm) is published in thirty-five 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

From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author (Seasons Quartet 2)

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 series (The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity and The Third Realm) is published in thirty-five 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.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Martin Aitken

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

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

Knausgaard unspools a philosophical cop drama shot through with shivery horror…exquisitely channelled

‘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 death 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. . . an exemplary masterclass in what fiction can offer' 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 
 
‘Unsettling, disturbing and riveting. . . 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’ SpectatorPRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD: 
 
'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

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Praise for 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 al ...

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 ...

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 electrif ...

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 al ...

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 ...

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 electrif ...

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 al ...

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 ...

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 electrif ...

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

10 must-read Scandinavian novels

Where to start with 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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