Girl, 1983

(Hardback)

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A heart-rending work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers 'By writing down what happened, by telling the story as truthfully as I can, I'm trying to bring them together into one body - the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don't know if it can be done' Paris, a winter's night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, Unquiet, Linn Ullmann continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. Girl, 1983 is a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.

Reviews

Linn Ullmann has mastered the art of seeing into the dark mysteries that make us who we are
Among Norways contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence * John Freeman, LitHub *
Ullmann is masterfully precise with language, pinning a wealth of detail in a simple phrase * Time Out *
Ullmanns grasp of the ambiguous natures of her people and her understanding of their background is admirably strong . . . she has a keenness of ear and eye, and a sharpness of mind, that is all her own * Independent *

Author Bio

Linn Ullmann is the author of seven award-winning and critically-acclaimed novels. Her work has been published in 36 languages, and adapted for both stage and screen. Unquiet has received multiple awards, spent more than a year on the Scandinavian bestseller lists and was heralded as a modern classic in Norway. Girl, 1983 was the bestselling Norwegian novel in 2022, was awarded the Aschehoug Prize and was a nominee for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. In 2017 Ullmann received the Doubloug Prize from the Swedish Academy for her body of work. She lives in Oslo with her family.