Some Rain Must Fall

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

Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times

Rachel Cusk, Guardian

Expect beautifully written angst

Independent

Compulsively gripping.

Guardian

Bracing, maddening and utterly compelling

Robert Collins, The Sunday Times

[Some Rain Must Fall] is Knausgaard at his best… It’s a rare novelist who writes about student bars and the Happy Mondays at the same time as yearning for spiritual salvation

Max Liu, Independent

It is a pen-and-paper virtual reality; after reading it you feel that another past has been downloaded into your mind

Laurence Scott, Financial Times

In Some Rain Must Fall he also shows a startling ability to re-create the world of his younger self, still unformed, his life path not mapped out, no literary success prefigured or expected.

Bookseller

Reverberates with life’s core questions… In its depiction of the torment of writer’s block and a young adult’s struggle to construct a sense of self, both on and off the page, it is brilliant

Anita Sethi, Mail on Sunday

This is a man trying to recapture his history in all its unheroic moments, to pay full attention to its life and the ordinary share of pain and beauty he's been accorded.

Times Literary Supplement

For Knausgaard's obsessive fans, this cycle is the most exciting literary project of our times... Knausgaard is the most humane writer in the world… He writes beautifully… It is precisely in the commonness of the lovingly recorded details that these books spin their magic

Daniel Swift, Spectator

The lack of stylishness works to Knausgaard’s advantage: it aids the impression that there’s an unusual lack of artifice to his work.

Edmund Gordon, Times Literary Supplement

The sense of movement that animated the first volumes is back.

Phillip Maughan, Literary Review

Charts his battles with alcohol abuse, ambition and loneliness with staggering honesty.

Esquire

Part of Knausgaard’s appeal is believability: his books may be called novels but we read them as memoirs. The meticulous detail seems to guarantee their authenticity… Childhood, sex, love, art, work and death are there too, writ small from his own perspective, but compellingly observed

Blake Morrison, Guardian

Raw, fast, improvisatory, unfettered. It’s addictive high-wire writing in which he unflinchingly reveals everything about himself

Shortlist

Literary girth doesn’t always translate into literary worth. Fortunately, that’s not the case in the work of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has taken the idea of the autobiographical epic to altogether loftier plains.

Tanya Sweeney, Sunday Business Post

This is the struggle of a young writer in what one may call the Bildungsroman book of Min Kamp

Winstonsdad

Well worth the carry-on weight... He’s a thrillingly unusual writer, with a painterly eye for detail. This is perfect for hip-lit readers in search of a highbrow snack by the pool.

Business Post

He writes with staggering intimacy and unexpected grace… Superbly translated by Don Bartlett, whose epic work here is not often enough praised… Knausgaard is a great writer of menace… For many people, Knausgaard has changed a common expectation about what reading is for, and what it does.

Daniel Swift, Oldie

Knausgaard is more than just a bestseller.

Fiona Wilson, The Times

[The My Struggle series is] extraordinary, strangely addictive, at times difficult to read. It is perhaps the most candid and wide-ranging portrayal of an author's life ever written.

Josh Glancy, Sunday Times

Tremendous, maddening, addictive, gripping

Observer

Breathtaking... Knausgaard has a rare talent for making everyday life seem fascinating

The Times

The new phenomenon of 21st century´s literature… My Struggle is a Proustian exploration of 21st century life, a meditation that includes digression and evocations of a time that has passed but remains vivid in the memory, with no artifice other than the bare exposure of intimacy, in a unique perspective never before accomplished in such a microscopic detail.

Cristina Villadoniga, Culture Trip

Some Rain Must Fall feels like the crucible of Knausgaard’s struggle… A vital and quite brilliant totality: a portrait of the artist who is not yet quite an artist; a portrait of a man who not quite yet a man… Astonishing, brutal and consistently absorbing project’

Stuart Evars, Observer

[It] is arguably the richest and most powerful of the sequence.

Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

[It is] brilliant.

William Leith, Evening Standard, Book of the Year

My Karl Ove Knausgaard obsession continued into 2016 with Some Rain Must Fall.

Will Hodgkinson, The Times, Book of the Year

Knausgaard has taken the idea of the epic autobiographical novel to altogether more dizzying plains… A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for our times.

Irish Independent, Book of the Year

[It] is wholly engrossing. In breath-catching detail it recounts the author’s many humiliations, occasional triumphs, and eventual catastrophes as an aspiring writer… Few writers have been this honest.

Rob Doyle, Irish Independent, Book of the Year

One of the startling joys of My Struggle’s looping, non-chronological form is that reading collides with the processes of memory… [A] beautiful installment.

Laurence Scott, Financial Times