Min kamp 1 opens with a dizzying description of death. From there, it tells the story of author Karl Ove Knausgård's struggle to master life, himself, and his own ambitions for writing, as he interacts with the people around him.
The novel explores the experience of growing up and being thrust into a world that seems complete, finished, and closed. It captures the sensitivity and uncertainty of a young perspective, observing the presence and judgments of others with an openness that is both overwhelming and almost self-destructive in its consequence.
In a probing prose that seeks out the vulnerable, the embarrassing, and the existentially significant, this becomes a deeply personal novel, self-examining and controversial. An existential focal point is the death of the father, while another might be the protagonist's debut as a writer.
From the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, this book is a work of astonishing intimacy and depth. Using a pillow book as her form, nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn sets out to write her life for her unborn daughter. What emerges is a portrait of an extraordinary girl, who writes frankly of love, sex, poetry, nature, faith, and of herself in the world.
Her thoughts range widely: on Shakespeare and breasts, periods and piano playing, friendship and trees, consciousness and sleep, and much more besides. As she writes of William Blacklin, the boy she chooses as her first lover, or Julie, the teacher who encourages her spiritual life, Cordelia maddens, fascinates, and ultimately seduces the reader. This is a character never to be forgotten from a writer at the height of his powers.
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past...
A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spends a day on a country drive and embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's greatness and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.