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  • Published: 16 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241464625
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $26.00

Unquiet




An astonishingly beautiful work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers

Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visited her father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea.

Years later, when she is grown with children of her own and he's in his eighties, they plan to write a book together. It will be about age and time, language and memory. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the man is gone, only memories - both remembered and recorded - remain.

Heart-breaking and spellbinding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.

  • Published: 16 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241464625
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $26.00

Praise for Unquiet

Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters

Rachel Cusk

This magnificent, elegant work is pure tour de force... one of the best things I've read in a long, long time

Ali Smith

[An] exquisite and warm novel ... Among Norway's contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence

John Freeman

Unquiet is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family story told with a directness, naturalness, and grace that can only result from Linn Ullmann's close attention to the eloquent details of day-to-day life, her honest embrace of herself and the people close to her, and a keen sensitivity to language and the high demands of good writing

Lydia Davis

I've long admired Linn Ullmann's fiction, and Unquiet is her masterpiece. Based on her upbringing as the child of two great artists, it is the portrait of complex loves; of a youth divided and inspired by diametrically opposed creative influences; and of the ravages of age. Calm yet fierce, exquisitely rendered, this novel imprints itself indelibly?as if you, too, had been there

Claire Messud

Ullmann navigates the dangerous and fissile territory... with great power. I am in awe

Edmund de Waal

Effortlessly lucid, full of grace and restraint

Sunday Times

A powerful and unsettling hybrid of memoir, fiction and meditation ... The work of a lifetime

Guardian