Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3

‘Rare and Ruthless... Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times’ Guardian

Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father.

In the now infamously direct style of the My Struggle cycle, Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrated. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be.

Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart visible
- Independent

Knausgaard finds the sublime in the everyday... Boyhood Island reverberates with the joys and anxieties of early youth, and Knausgaard brilliantly recreates their exaggerated feel
- Times Literary Supplement

Compelling and addictive... One of the most grown-up works of fiction we have
- Observer

Knausgaard's Proustian attention to detail and scrupulous analysis of emotional nuance is almost maddening – but ultimately magnificent
- Vogue

Knausgaard continues masterfully
- Literary Review

One of the most anticipated books of the year (the decade)
- Financial Times

His devotees gobble each new volume with an eagerness previously reserved only for box sets of Borgen
- Daily Telegraph

Powerfully hypnotic and addictive… a Norwegian Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
- Sunday Times

Knausgaard transforms the personal and mundane into the universal and perennially significant... There is such depth of feeling beneath the vibrant exterior, such sense of the goodness present in human existence
- Spectator

Accessibly and punchily written, an intimate, determined and ultimately successful attempt to shape the tiny mundanities of life into something quite unexpectedly beautiful, compelling and substantial
- Metro

Knausgaard is a writer strong enough to survive the hype... A masterpiece for the age of the selfie... Brutally frank about the frustrations of marriage, work and parenthood, it's often horrifying and deeply funny
- Observer

Compelling
- Evening Standard

Astounding... A work of such sincerity that, to paraphrase Baudelaire, the paper shrivels and flares at the touch of his fiery pen
- Quietus

Free-form, fear-filled, densely descriptive…Norway’s biggest literary star since Ibsen… [Knausgaard] has no obvious superiors among the writers now available to an English-reading public
- New Statesman

My Struggle is already the most significant literary achievement of the 21st century and we still have three volumes to go
- Sunday Express

Boyhood Island is a tuning fork shaking loose the reader's own memories
- The Timse

There is more to the case of Knausgaard than brutal hype. The books are beautifully readable and convey an atmosphere of robust authenticity
- Prospect

A work of genius
- London Review of Books

Peculiarly addictive
- Evening Standard

Knausgaard has rocked the world again
- Bath Chronicle

Intense, stark and shocking. Also superb
- Evening Standard

Superbly translated
- Independent

Intense, stark and shocking
- Scotsman