Arendal

A haunting new novel about forbidden love from Karl Ove Knausgaard, "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations" (Wall Street Journal).

The year is 1976. Syvert Løyning is on his way home to his wife and two sons after a business trip when his car breaks down outside Arendal, and he is forced to spend the night in the city. It is winter and bitterly cold. The ocean has frozen over, and ice spreads out away from the shore, so thick that cars drive on it. There, with home so close and yet out of reach, a space opens up between knowing and not knowing for Syvert. Regretful, longing memories of an affair resurface without warning, and, suddenly, he is overcome by the feeling he is no longer himself. He hesitates about visiting his mother who lives nearby but then is drawn almost involuntarily to her door after learning that a childhood friend has recently died. Something is shifting inexorably and dangerously in the city, as he wanders its dark streets, but also within him.

An eerie, otherworldly novel about forbidden love, Arendal is the depiction of a breakdown accompanied by a mesmerizing dream vision. With his characteristically soulful, interior perspective, Knausgaard writes about communing with the dead, about fire and ice, about dizzying starry skies, and about a man desperately in search of consolation.