Unquiet

Description

An astonishingly beautiful work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visited her father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Years later, when she is grown with children of her own and he's in his eighties, they plan to write a book together. It will be about age and time, language and memory. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the man is gone, only memories - both remembered and recorded - remain. Heart-breaking and spellbinding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.

Linn Ullmann is the author of six award-winning and critically-acclaimed novels. Her work has been published in more than thirty 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. In 2017 Ullmann received the Doubloug Prize from the Swedish Academy for her body of work. She lives in Oslo with her family.

Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters * Rachel Cusk * This magnificent, elegant work is pure tour de force... one of the best things I've read in a long, long time * Ali Smith * [An] exquisite and warm novel ... Among Norway's contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence * John Freeman * Unquiet is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family story told with a directness, naturalness, and grace that can only result from Linn Ullmann's close attention to the eloquent details of day-to-day life, her honest embrace of herself and the people close to her, and a keen sensitivity to language and the high demands of good writing * Lydia Davis * I've long admired Linn Ullmann's fiction, and Unquiet is her masterpiece. Based on her upbringing as the child of two great artists, it is the portrait of complex loves; of a youth divided and inspired by diametrically opposed creative influences; and of the ravages of age. Calm yet fierce, exquisitely rendered, this novel imprints itself indelibly?as if you, too, had been there * Claire Messud * Ullmann navigates the dangerous and fissile territory... with great power. I am in awe * Edmund de Waal * Effortlessly lucid, full of grace and restraint * Sunday Times * A powerful and unsettling hybrid of memoir, fiction and meditation ... The work of a lifetime * Guardian *