A heart-rending work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers'By
writing down what happened by telling the story as truthfully as I can I'm trying to bring
them together into one body - the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don't know if it
can be done'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. Set in Oslo New York and Paris
Girl 1983 is a genre-defying 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 long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over
the course of a life this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward
sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. Girl 1983 is a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and
forgetting desire and shame power and powerlessness.
