Overview

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.

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9780241639627

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Reviews

Linn Ullmann has mastered the art of seeing into the dark mysteries that make us who we are Among Norway’s 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 * Ullmann’s 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 * 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 -- Roxana Robinson

Linn Ullmann has mastered the art of seeing into the dark mysteries that make us who we are Among Norway’s 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 * Ullmann’s 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 Information

Linn Ullmann (Author) Linn Ullmann is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature. Her novels have been translated into over twenty languages, and she has received numerous awards, including the Amalie Skram Prize, the Dobloug Prize and the Aschehoug Prize - all for her collected body of work. Girl, 1983 was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize, as was its predecessor Unquiet, published by Hamish Hamilton in 2020. The two novels form part of an ongoing trilogy, meditating on memory, rage and desire. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken has translated the works of many Scandinavian writers, among them Karl Ove Knausgaard, Helle Helle, Hanne rstavik and Olga Ravn. He lives in Denmark.

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