Boyhood Island (#3 My Struggle)

Description

'Rare and Ruthless... Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times' Guardian Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father. In the now infamously direct style of the My Strugglecycle, Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrated. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be.

Awards

Long-listed for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015.

Author description

Karl Ove Knausgaard's first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win The Norwegian Critics' Prize. His second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first instalment in the epic My Struggle cycle, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award and is being heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.