An irresistible story of childhood adventure from the international phenomenon Karl Ove
Knausgaard. 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. '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
