The Story of a Marriage

Description

A short, intense, utterly compelling novel from Nordic Prize-nominated author Geir Gulliksen, Knausgaard's editor in Norway. It's a portrait of marriage and manhood that will provoke debate, introspection and passionate responses from readers 'Brilliant and breathtaking...sexy and sad' A.M. Homes In his struggle to understand what has happened to his family, how his wife could fall in love with another man after twenty happy years, Jon attempts to tell the story of the painful collapse of his marriage, but from her point of view. He tries to get inside her head, to see it all as she did, all the while knowing that he can never really achieve this, and that his efforts reveal more projection than insight. How can one truly know another person? How much of what we think is love, is just a construct? Is it possible to find - and maintain - the great love we long for? Gulliksen explores these questions, turning them over again and again till they crack, revealing hollowness - or possible new meanings. Intense, erotic, dramatic, raw - Story of a Marriage examines two people's inner lives with devastating and fearless honesty. It is a gripping but slippery narrative of obsession and deceit, of a couple striving for happiness and freedom and intimacy, but ultimately falling apart.

Geir Gulliksen is a publisher and highly acclaimed writer of fiction and non-fiction. In 2014 he received the Aschehoug Award for his work, and this novel was nominated for the Nordic Prize. He lives in Norway.

A brilliant and breathtaking novel that is for anyone who has ever loved... Story of a Marriage is the naked truth, sexy and sad, stunning for its clarity, the author's ability to simultaneously render denial and knowing too much. It is a novel about all the things we know and don't want to know about ourselves, our partners and our lives and the shocking reminder that the very same things that draw us together are the ones that pull us apart. -- A.M. Homes Bristling with the urgency of lived experience, this is a short and beautifully written account of love's autoimmunity. -- Andrew Anthony * Observer * Exquisitely lean prose -- Elisa Segrave * Literary Review * this philosophical domestic drama...is painfully persuasive in its view of relationships * The New Yorker *