Welcome to America - Softcover

Boström Knausgard, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1642860417 ISBN 13: 9781642860412

Publisher: World Editions, 2019

Synopsis

"A piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. (...) melodic, mythological, transformative, a testament to literature's powers..." Vanity Fair
Ellen has stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother's barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We're a family of light! she insists. But darkness seeps in everywhere and in their separate worlds each of them longs for togetherness.

About this title

Review:

"A piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. (...) melodic, mythological, transformative, a testament to literature's powers..." --Vanity Fair

"...a taut portrait of how difficult it can be to reconcile ideals about faith and family with their messier realities. An intense, recursive book that evokes the chill despair of a Bergman film." --Kirkus Reviews

"The narrative is borderline stream-of-consciousness, with hallucinations mingling with reality, forcing readers to constantly question what they are told. Knausgård is an impressive writer, and she has created a unique, powerful lead in a world all her own." --Publishers Weekly

"In striking prose, Knausgård examines the power of silence and the complicated reality of family. A singular and thought-provoking story with a child narrator you won't soon forget. I look forward to Knausgård's next book!" --Bookriot

"Welcome to America is a slim, beautiful act of grace, a novel that moves easily through the shadows and patches of light within its characters, through truths half-glimpsed and barely acknowledged. It will remind readers of the intimate force of Ingmar Bergman's films, secrets and lies in close focus, haunting and desperately true." -- Robert J Wiersema for The Toronto Star

"Sparse, sleek and exacting...[Boström Knausgård] provides a haunting and evocative portrait of the process of trauma and the awareness of personal isolationism, even within the structures of faith and family." --Alice Martin for Shelf Awareness

"Boström Knausgård's careful exploration of mental illness is restrained and entirely unsentimental. She passes no judgment on her characters, whose pain she reveals through Ellen's musings. Her prose is unobtrusive in its simplicity and minimalism. The result is both powerful and lyrical, qualities beautifully rendered by translator Martin Aitken's concise, pared-down English text."--Deborah Bragan-Turner for Words Without Borders

"Knausgård's story of a family in crisis is shocking and imaginative. Everything is written in beautiful and sparse prose which suggests that, after all, from darkness comes light." --Jury, August Prize

"Knausgård's artistry is masterful." --Bookslut

"Welcome to America presents itself as an étude in the musical sense of the term: a basic theme that varies to infinity, acquiring with each new variation a new unprecedented facet. A triumph." --Le Monde

"The incandescent Welcome to America allows one to discover the author's vibrant and powerful universe."--Lire"Gets you in the gut. A delirious dance." --L'Alsace Quotidien

"A tender novel about a mute girl: gentle, sensitive, minimal, concise, subtle, and brutal. This is writing as self-defense and liberation." --Volker Weidermann for Spiegel

"A daring and disturbing novel. One will not soon forget the eleven-year-old narrator and her silence." --MDR Kultur

"In her slim book, Boström Knausgård conjures a constellation reminiscent of a psychological thriller. Welcome to America is a book that masterfully describes the many nuances of inner darkness." --Austria Presse Agentur

"A short, very lyrical novel. The scenes succeed in their great universality, closely observed, wisely questioned." --Brigitte Woman

"Outstanding psychological chamber play. Linda Boström Knausgård has an incredible ability to give voice to the young narrator's haunting thoughts and she does it through such dense prose that is both simple and powerful, both tangible and poetic." --Politiken

"Boström Knausgård has her own poetic language. The imagery is just as natural and brilliant as it is mad and askew." --Dagbladet

"A great book! Linda Boström Knausgård certainly does not shy away from the dark and horrible in her family dramas. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and precise. I really love this novel." --Aftonbladet

"A book cannot, like a person, be accomplished. But Linda Boström Knausgård manages to get very close. She keeps her balance perfectly: she never judges, never justifies. She just narrates, with perfection." --Sydsvenskan

"Linda Boström Knausgård erases herself from her own writing. What remains is the girl who communicates directly with the reader in a remarkably strong voice, despite her being so quiet."--Svenska Dagbladet

"Hers is a way of writing that takes risks, without considering the consequences, heading straight for the unknown. Reading her novella is like experiencing a condensed depiction of decay, a decay that also carries a light so strong that it is like standing in the middle of a ray of sunshine." --Jönköpings-Poste

About the Author:

LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD (Sweden) is an author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for Swedish radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was awarded the Mare Kandre Prize and shortlisted for the Swedish Radio Novel Award 2014. Welcome to America, her second novel, has been awarded the prestigious Swedish August Prize and nominated for the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: World Editions
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1642860417
• ISBN 13: 9781642860412
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160