Overview

“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 begin 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’s narrator 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.

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9781324066354

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Reviews

""This book, about how we meet and understand the powers and the powerful vulnerabilities that form and have formed us, is written with extraordinary courage and a spirit that astounds. It's a work of real strength: poetic, witty, vital, cool and fevered both at once. Girl, 1983 does more than hold the self at all its ages. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension. I think it's a masterpiece."" -- Ali Smith, author of Gliff ""Girl, 1983 unearths one young woman's exhilaration, confusion and darkness on the cusp of adulthood, drawn inexorably to glamor, only to discover its raw agonies. Linn Ullmann is a master of calm devastation; this is a haunting book."" -- Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History ""Linn Ullmann’s new novel, Girl, 1983, is both beautiful and unsettling. A slow exploration of the narrator’s past becomes a quiet and disturbing interrogation of the world’s treatment of young women. Here beauty is a dangerous possession, drawing its owner into silence and complicity with those who would harm her. Brava to Ullmann for bravely taking on this dark subject, one which permeates our culture."" -- Roxanna Robinson, author of Leaving ""Ullmann’s gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling."" -- Deborah Levy, author of The Position of Spoons

Author Information

Linn Ullmann is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature and the author of seven novels. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and many of her titles have been adapted for the stage. She has received numerous awards, including the Norwegian Gullpennen (Golden Pen) for her journalistic work, and the Amalie Skram Prize, the Dobloug Prize, and the Aschehoug Prize for her collected body of work. Both Girl, 1983 and Unquiet were nominated for Northern Europe’s most prestigious literary award, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and were bestsellers throughout Scandinavia. They form part of an ongoing trilogy meditating on memory, rage, and desire. Ullmann’s background is in journalism and literary criticism. She teaches creative writing and lives in Oslo with her husband, the writer and poet Niels Fredrik Dahl, and their family. Martin Aitken has translated the works of many Scandinavian writers, among them Helle Helle, Hanne Ørstavik, Olga Ravn, and Karl Ove Knausgård. He lives in Denmark.

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