My Struggle

An international sensation since Book One, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part autobiographical novel My Struggle, hailed as one of the highest achievements in contemporary literature, is a relentless account of the author’s own life. Beginning with the loss of his alcoholic father, to young Karl Ove’s awkward adolescence and failed attempts at love, to his later anxieties about fatherhood and raising children with a mentally-unstable wife, readers will come to each installment “…like crack” (Zadie Smith). My Struggle has struck a nerve in the literary culture like no other work of contemporary fiction.

“Intense and vital . . . Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties.” James Wood, The New Yorker