Girl, 1983

A masterpiece. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension Ali Smith

A heart-rending work of autofiction from one of Norways most prominent literary writers

Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before and looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret.

Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion – a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.

‘Ullmann’s gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling’ Deborah Levy