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.

‘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

He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea.

Now that she’s grown up – a writer, with children of her own – and he’s in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record.

But it’s winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words — both remembered and recorded – remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book.

Heart-breaking and spell-binding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.