Boyhood Island

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes Out of the World, A Time for Everything and the Seasons Quartet, is published in thirty-five languages.

An irresistible story of childhood adventure from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard.

* Karl Ove Knausgaard's dazzling new novel, The Morning Star, is available to pre-order now *

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 Struggle cycle, 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.

'Knausgaard finds the sublime in the everyday... Boyhood Island reverberates with the joys and anxieties of early youth, and Knausgaard brilliantly recreates their exaggerated feel'
Times Literary Supplement

Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart visibleKnausgaard finds the sublime in the everyday... Boyhood Island reverberates with the joys and anxieties of early youth, and Knausgaard brilliantly recreates their exaggerated feelCompelling and addictive... One of the most grown-up works of fiction we havePowerfully hypnotic and addictive… a Norwegian Paddy Clarke Ha Ha HaMy Struggle is already the most significant literary achievement of the 21st century and we still have three volumes to goKnausgaard's Proustian attention to detail and scrupulous analysis of emotional nuance is almost maddening – but ultimately magnificentKnausgaard continues masterfullyOne of the most anticipated books of the year (the decade)