Dancing in the Dark

Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600 page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600 page novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to

New York Times Book Review

It's unbelievable...I need the next volume like crack. It's completely blown my mind

Zadie Smith

At the end of this bittersweet stint in the far north, translated again with both dynamism and delicacy by Don Bartlett, the last track invoked happens to be that talisman of the late John Peel: "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones. For all its manic overdub of detail, Dancing in the Dark delivers a knockout kick

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

The narrator may be intellectually earnest, an aesthete who mediates on the sublime, but he is also a hapless fool, prone to Chaplinesque pratfalls. In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard allows us to see ourselves...it works wonderfully well

Blake Morrison, Guardian

If the function of literature is to take you out of your own life and involve you in someone else’s then My Struggle is literature…gripping

John Carey, Sunday Times

The most appealing in the series so far

Daily Express

Irresistible

Financial Times

If you have read the first one, you will need to read on – and you shouldn’t stop reading until the end

Toby Lichtig, Literary Review

Knausgaard perfectly captures the heady mixture of elation and confusion to be found in late adolescence... My Struggle remains addictive, intensely funny and intensely serious. Like the young man here portrayed, it is "full to the brim with energy and life"

Times Literary Supplement

So intense, so passionate and so compulsively readable

Malcolm Forbes, Glasgow Sunday Herald

An elegiac kind of comic novel, and it is pure Karl Ove Knausgaard

Dwight Garner, New York Times

Addictive

Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal (Europe)

His work is transformative: to read it is to experience his life alongside him…. To read it is also to feel more human, more certain of what is means to be alive… It’s a brilliant depiction of an intense, philosophical and provocative young man

Joanne Hayden, Sunday Business Post

[Knausgaard] writes a clear prose that transforms ordinary events, detailing the span of his life with such directness that everything seems to be happening in real time

Rodney Welch, Washington Post

Of huge literary significance. Zadie Smith, who described Knausgaard as "like crack", was right: it’s addictive stuff

Bookseller

A living hero

Jonathan Lethem, Guardian

A work of genius

Ben Lerner, London Review of Books

Fires every nerve ending while summoning in the reader the sheer sense of how amazing it is to be alive

Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times

Beautifully human... Being drawn into his world is an ineluctable pleasure

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

It has strong claim to be the great literary event of the twenty-first century

Guardian

If the function of literature is to take you out of your own life and involve you in someone else’s, then My Struggle is literature

John Carey, Sunday Times

In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard also allows us to see ourselves. And for the most part, however unattractive his teenage self looks in this volume, it works wonderfully well

Blake Morrison, Guardian

[Knausgaard] captures a very specific moment in life, the cusp of adulthood, with masterful precision

William Leith, Evening Standard

The fleetest, funniest and – in keeping with its adolescent protagonist – most sophomoric of the volumes translated into English thus far

International New York Times

Brilliant: the ribald confessions of a frustrated student teacher in a remote arctic village. American Pie meets Kierkegaard

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

No one who has followed the series from the outset would want to be without it

Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph

[Knausgaard] combines mundane observation and self-obsession with deep reflection, and turns a phrase good enough to make it all thoroughly addictive

Will Hodgkinson, The Times