Linda Boström Knausgård - October Child

A fight against the dark

From 2013 to 2017, the narrator was periodically interned in a psychiatric ward where she was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. As the treatments at this factory progressed, the writers memories began to disappear. What good is a writer without her memory? This novel, based on the authors experiences, is an eloquent and profound attempt to hold on to the past, to create a story, to make sense, and to keep alive ties to family, friends, and even oneself. Moments from childhood, youth, marriage, parenting, and divorce flicker across the pages of October Child . This is the story of one womans struggle against mental illness and isolation. It is a raw testimony of how writing can preserve and heal.

Praise for October Child:

October Child is a bold book, not in its openness but in its aloofness, in its faithfulness to literature and language rather than to reason and science. Against the great story of psychiatry with its simple, ready-made answer, Bostrm Knausgrd insists on the irrationality of humans and on the suffering of each individual.

Gteborgs-Posten

Linda Bostrm Knausgrds October Child drove the breath from my lungs. I cant recall when I last read a novel that struck me and held me fast in this manner.

Expressen

October Child is a desperate reckoning with psychiatric care. But it is also an ingeniously composed novel with mercilessly beautiful language.

Sydsvenskan

As expected, language that is self-assured and lyrical, but in an unexpectedly acute and polemical novel.

Kulturnytt P1

Linda Bostrm Knausgrds prose moves seamlessly and evocatively between worlds. She writes as if in a dream. Its eerie and gripping.

Aftonbladet

Linda Bostrm Knausgrd writes with her usual linguistic momentum, a kind of inviting energy in her voice. She balances her desperation with poetic precision and makes the urgency real for the reader.

Svenska Dagbladet

Linda Bostrm Knausgrd creates images and scenes with a vibrant presence and her language often takes lovely poetic turns.

Dagens Nyheter

Intense and painful.

Jnkpings-Posten

Linda Bostrm Knausgrds language is like water: occasionally it pours, sometimes it solidifies to ice. As a reader, I am frozen in her despair.

Bors Tidning

In this turmoil of darkest emotions, one marvels at the clarity of the prose. Throughout her internment, the author asks herself a question: Will I be able to write again? Do I have what it takes? The simple and quick answer to that question is, Yes .

stersund Post

A bloodcurdling memorial work, as if secretly written from a bedside. It is a difficult read, painful because it is at once so insightful and despairing, so hopeless and written in a frightening anger that spares no one, least of all the narrator. It is less literary than Bostrm Knausgrds previous work, and perhaps precisely because of this, in its vulnerable non-perfection, it is so overwhelming. One cannot forget it.

SVT Nyheten

Praise for Welcome to America:

Here, restraint and ambiguity prevail, whether its about the intensity of the abuse Ellen sustained or the veracity of her assertions. Regardless, its a taut portrait of how difficult it can be to reconcile ideals about faith and family with their messier realities. An intense, recursive book that evokes the chill despair of a Bergman film.

Kirkus Reviews

Knausgrd is an impressive writer, who has created a unique, powerful lead in a world all her own.

Publishers Weekly

A piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. Melodic, mythological, transformative, a testament to literatures powers.

Vanity Fair

Every word is there for a reason.

MinnPost

A singular and thought-provoking story with a child narrator you wont soon forget.

Book Riot

Knausgrds story of a family in crisis is shocking and imaginative. Everything is written in beautiful and sparse prose which suggests that, after all, from darkness comes light.

JURY, AUGUST PRIZE

Knausgrds artistry is masterful.

Bookslut

Welcome to America presents itself as an tude in the musical sense of the term: a basic theme that varies to infinity, acquiring with each new variation a new unprecedented facet. A triumph.

Le Monde

The incandescent Welcome to America allows one to discover the authors vibrant and powerful universe.

Lire

Gets you in the gut. A delirious dance.

LAlsace Quotidien

A tender novel about a mute girl: gentle, sensitive, minimal, concise, subtle, and brutal. This is writing as self-defense and liberation.

VOLKER WEIDERMANN, Spiegel

A daring and disturbing novel. One will not soon forget the eleven-year-old narrator and her silence.

MDR Kultur

In her slim book, Bostrm Knausgrd conjures a constellation reminiscent of a psychological thriller. Welcome to America is a book that masterfully describes the many nuances of inner darkness.

Austria Presse Agentur (APA)

A short, very lyrical novel. The scenes succeed in their great universality, closely observed, wisely questioned.

Brigitte Woman

Outstanding psychological chamber play. Linda Bostrm Knausgrd has an incredible ability to give voice to the young narrators haunting thoughts and she does it through such dense prose that is both simple and powerful, both tangible and poetic.

Politiken

Bostrm Knausgrd has her own poetic language. The imagery is just as natural and brilliant as it is mad and askew.

Dagbladet

A great book! Linda Bostrm Knausgrd certainly does not shy away from the dark and horrible in her family dramas. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and precise. I really love this novel.

Aftonbladet

A book cannot, like a person, be accomplished. But Linda Bostrm Knausgrd manages to get very close. She keeps her balance perfectly: She never judges, never justifies. She just narrates, with perfection.

Sydsvenskan

Linda Bostrm Knausgrd erases herself from her own writing. What remains is the girl who communicates directly with the reader in a remarkably strong voice, despite her being so quiet.

Svenska Dagbladet

Hers is a way of writing that takes risks, without considering the consequences, heading straight for the unknown. Reading her novella is like experiencing a condensed depiction of decay, a decay that also carries a light so strong that it is like standing in the middle of a ray of sunshine.

Jnkpings-Posten

Praise for The Helios Disaster:

In brilliant, harrowing pages of deep interiority, Knausgrd describes Annas fever dream of alienation; Anna is desperate for love and confounded by it, and chronically incapable of connecting with those who might provide it. Knausgrds bluntly surreal styleshe is also a poetsuits Annas vibrant, tormented imagination Tidy endings are nowhere to be found; Knausgrd instead gratifies by portraiture, in her thrilling conception of a young goddess on earth.

Publishers Weekly

A moving trip to an emotional bottom A flinty, lyrical, and storm-clouded study of loss.

Kirkus Reviews

Linda Bostrm Knausgrds The Helios Disaster vibrates with a strange, seductive intensity. A mythological origin story as well as a modern story of otherness, it portrays the push and pull of human connectionthe anguish of yearning for, but also fearing, the warmth and reach of others. Knausgrds simple, disarming words bear complex, profound, and surprising truths.

CHIA-CHIA LIN, author of The Unpassing

Blending psychological realism with a hallucinatory dose of the mythological, Linda Bostrm Knausgrds The Helios Disaster eludes easy classification. Its a slim novel that moves from trauma to revelation and back again; its also a disconcerting reworking of some memorable myths and legends. Running throughout the novel is a measured consideration of belief and humanitys relationship to the divineboth metaphorically and literally.