A masterpiece It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension Ali SmithA heartrending work of autofiction from one of Norways most prominent literary writersBy writing down what happened by telling the story as truthfully as I can Im trying to bring them together into one body the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983 I dont know if it can be doneParis a winters 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 beforeSet in Oslo New York and Paris Girl 1983 is a genredefying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion As in her landmark previous work Unquiet Linn Ullmann continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a longguarded secret A delineation of time and place over the course of a life this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteenyearold girl lost in ParisGirl 1983 is a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting desire and shame power and powerlessnessUllmanns gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling Deborah Levy
