Linn Ullmann
Linn Ullmann

Unquiet

Linn Ullmann

Unquiet is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK.

Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea.
Now that she's grown up - a writer, with children of her own - and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record.

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

But old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words -- both remembered and recorded - remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book.

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

Linn Ullmann

Cover of the pocket edition, published June 2021.

Watch Linn Ullmann read an excerpt and talk about the novel in this interview at Louisiana Channel – subtitled in English:

Said about the book

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

In Unquiet, that remembered life not only breathes. It roars. Fiction’s freedom permits Ullmann’s tone to swivel from lyrical reverie to tough-minded judgment, from tender mourning to a delicious vein of sardonic wit and affectionate takedown

— Boyd Tonkin, The Spectator

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

Ullmann moves deftly between narrative selves over time – from the little girl’s raw bewilderments to the adult’s reflective meditations. Unquiet is a beautiful book about the emotion and the art of memory.

— Siri Hustvedt

A pure tour de force. It's one of the best things I've read in a long, long time

— Ali Smith

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

An unflinching portrait of old age ... It is a unique work, non-linear yet effortlessly lucid, full of grace and restraint … [Ullmann] is committed to rendering both parents in all their shifting complexity. In doing so, she unsentimentally captures real love.

— The Times

A brilliant meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of memory… Ullmann’s prose is elegant […] sharp, and occasionally funny. But the mood of this work as a whole is elegiac. ‘Can I,’ she asks, ‘mourn people who are still alive?’ Gorgeous and heartbreaking.

— Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

An exquisite and warm novel... Among Norway’s contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence. Here she blasts her story into fragments and puts it back together, piece by piece, with the artistry of someone who has always secretly known the broken things are most beautiful.

— LitHub

Didionesque

— New York Times Book Review

Gracefully exquisite, sharply funny, and richly poignant... Ullmann's homage to family, art, beauty, and love is resplendently vital, and enchantingly evocative.

— Booklist

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

With singular imagination and generosity, Linn Ullmann breaks new ground in the art of memory, transporting us into the sources of magic in her life with her enchanting parents

— Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter

Spellbinding… Ullmann confronts the nature of growing old while subtly studying her own childhood and middle age through the lens of her father’s decline… 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)

In the press

  • Check out this interview in The Atlantic: “Before You Can Write a Good Plot, You Need to Write a Good Place”

  • Interview in The New York Times Magazine, January 2019: “I don't want my writing to be charming”

  • Adaptation in The New Yorker: Time for the Eyes to Adjust, December 2018

Reviews

Other books