Description

‘A masterpiece. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension’ Ali Smith

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

Publisher Review

Linn Ullmann’s writing, already distinct for its rare moral clarity, attains a new authority in Girl, 1983. It is the authority of focus, of a grip on life that grows more tenacious as its scope determinedly narrows. In the manner of Annie Ernaux, Ullmann uses the act of attention as a weapon against indifference. It is as though, by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to confer sanity on them. Yet there is also a brightness and generosity to her work that seems to turn its themes – the powerlessness of youth and femininity, the intermingling of memory and shame – inside out — Rachel Cusk 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 *