The acclaimed debut novel of passion and subtlety that links three generations of eccentric, formidable women. Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is both playful and melancholy—a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother Anni, alluring, manipulative, and melodramatic; her sister Julie, a wife and mother nearly undone by suspicions of her husband’s infidelity; her aunt Selma, “the world’s angriest old woman”; and her soldier grandmother June, who bets that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all. Inventive and wise, funny and disquieting, Before You Sleep marks the arrival of a gifted new literary voice. “Ullmann creates such a powerful mood of intimacy here that the reader feels like a part of the family.” —Los Angeles Times “Ullmann’s imagination . . . is formed by a love of the intricacies of family life, of the ties that bind.”—The New Yorker

Before You Sleep

Literature & Fiction

Ullmann, Linn

Genre Fiction

Penguin??Books

Unquiet

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Hamish Hamilton

Linn Ullmann Unquiet /anglais

Penguin Uk

From the internationally acclaimed author of Stella Descending and Grace, a captivating story of sisterhood and of the inescapable chords of childhood memory.\ Every summer Isak Lövenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none compares to Erika’s bond with the rebellious misfit Ragnar, the intensity of which makes them inseparable. But when they reach the age of fourteen and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar’s outcast state, she suddenly turns away—a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to forever alter Isak’s family. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarsö to see their father—now eighty, a bereaved widower, and in year-round exile there—the three women confront, finally, the specter of that awful summer, the mark of which each has since carried. Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost.

A Blessed Child

Literary

KNOPF

A Blessed Childis a haunting parable of innocence lost from the internationally acclaimed author of Grace and Stella Descending. Every summer Isak Lövenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly find a sense of family and friendship, although nothing can match Erika's connection to the rebellious misfit Ragnar. But when an act of senseless cruelty separates them forever—and drives the sisters from the island in shame and regret—they must leave childhood and their growing relationships behind. Now, twenty-five years later, they return to visit their ailing father and confront the specter of that awful summer.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Contemporary

Picador

Translated form the Norwegian, this is a detailed and sexually frank novel about motherhood and marriage, love and infidelity. Spanning three generations in the life of a Norwegian family, the story moves from present-day to Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn. Ullmann tells her story through the voices of the eccentric and formidable women of the Blom family.

Translated form the Norwegian, this is a detailed and sexually frank novel about motherhood and marriage, love and infidelity. Spanning three generations in the life of a Norwegian family, the story moves from present-day to Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn. Ullmann tells her story through the voices of the eccentric and formidable women of the Blom family.

Before You Sleep (A Format)

Review\n"Ullmann has formed a book out of the explicit landmarks of her lived life.… The form of the book, however, isn’t documentary, but, rather, fragmentary, the way memory is.… The clarity and lack of fetter is characteristic of [her] way of seeing the world in prose." 
― Wyatt Mason, New York Times Magazine\n"Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don’t know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters―dangerous artistically as well as personally―without capsizing or making a mistake, but it is a tremendous accomplishment. Funny, graceful, interesting, modest, and most of all a work of the highest moral competence." 
― Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy\n"A haunting meditation on the shifting moods between women and men over a lifetime of making art; the pains and pleasures of attachment, the boiling emotions of girlhood, the conflicts of motherhood, and the enchantment of a secluded home on the edge of a stormy sea, in which a famous father writes his dreams on the bedside table. I could not put it down." 
― Deborah Levy, author of The Cost of Living\n"This magnificent, elegant work is pure tour de force. It’s part elegy, part elucidation of family love and family mystery, it’s funny, wry, dry, almost untakeably moving, and all of this is held steady in the form by Linn Ullmann’s refusal to swerve from the true, by her understanding of the combined human weakness and human marvelousness in all of us, and above all by her clear eye. It is a wonderful book, unputdownable, one that taps into the sheer electric current between the fictions and the truths that make our life stories. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long, long time." 
― Ali Smith, author of How to Be Both\n"[An] exquisite and warm novel.… Among Norway’s contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence." 
― John Freeman, LitHub\n"But even without knowing her parents were world-renowned, Unquiet would resonate powerfully because many of the issues it explores are common to parent-child relationships.… It’s a high-wire act few writers have performed with such grace." 
― Dmitry Samarov, Hyperallergic\n"A brilliant meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of memory.… Gorgeous and heartbreaking." 
― Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\n"Ullman succeeds on every level, blending time, memory, and emotion into a fascinating and intimate portrait that easily evokes the universal sense of love and loss. Highly recommended." 
― Library Journal (starred review)\n"This is a striking book about the enduring love between parents and children, and the fierce attachments that bind them even after death." 
― Publishers Weekly (starred review)\n"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, author of The End of the Story\n"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, author of The Burning Girl\n“Didionesque.” ―New York Times Book Review 
A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of the intricacies of family life, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old.

Unquiet: A Novel

W.W.Norton&Company

Praised across Scandinavia as a "literary masterpiece," "spellbinding," and "magnificent," Unquiet reflects on six taped conversations the author had with her father at the very end of his life.
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children. Every summer, since she was a little girl, she visits him at his beloved stony house surrounded by woods, poppies, and the Baltic sea. Now that she’s grown up and he’s in his late eighties, he envisions a book about old age. He worries that he’s losing his language, his memory, his mind. Growing old is hard work, he says. They will write it together. She will ask the questions. He will answer them.
When she finally comes to the island, bringing her tape recorder with her, old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen.
Unquiet follows the narrator as she unearths these taped conversations seven years later. Swept into memory, she reimagines the story of a father, a mother, and a girl―a child who can’t wait to grow up and parents who would rather be children.
A heartbreaking and darkly funny depiction of the intricacies of family, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old. Linn Ullmann nimbly blends memoir and fiction in her most inventive novel yet, weaving a luminous meditation on language, mourning, and the many narratives that make up a life.

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Books by Ullmann, Linn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ullmann, Linn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Before You Sleep

Unquiet

Linn Ullmann Unquiet /anglais

A Blessed Child

A Blessed Child

Before You Sleep

Before You Sleep

Before You Sleep (A Format)

Unquiet: A Novel

Unquiet: A Novel