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Private Confessions
Private Confessions
Aug 3, 2025 6:01 AM

Author:Ingmar Bergman

Private Confessions

The final novel in world renowned film-maker, Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy of novels plotting the fractious marriage of his parents

Twelve years of marriage, three children, a husband, Henrik, with whom she no longer finds anything in common: Anna is at the end of her tether. Besides, she’s in love – with Henrik’s friend Tomas, a student-priest, who is everything her husband is not.

Based upon film-maker, Ingmar Bergman’s own family life, Personal Confessions is the final part in Bergman’s loose trilogy of books that started with The Best Intentions and Sunday’s Children.

Reviews

As psychologically intricate and harshly personal as his movies

—— San Francisco Chronicle

One senses that this dark gem of a novel, set in resonant prose as elegant as a classical sonata, is a catharsis for Bergman

—— Publishers Weekly

Presented with a stark clarity that's reminiscent of some of the most memorable images of Bergman's films... A vibrant and moving addition to what begins to look more and more like a great work in progress

—— Kirkus Reviews

[A] prowling deep-sea monster of a novel … A sci-fi detective procedural, violent thriller and multi-layered mystery combine brilliantly to pull us through a profound exploration of power and paranoia, technology and myth … Harkaway dazzles, baffles and teases before guiding us through bloody darkness into understanding.

—— Daily Mail

This huge sci-fi detective novel of ideas is so eccentric, so audaciously plotted and so completely labyrinthine and bizarre that I had to put it aside more than once to emit Keanu-like “Whoahs” of appreciation ... It’s a technological shaggy-dog tale that threatens to out-Gibson William Gibson ... It is huge fun. And it will melt your brain … 700 odd pages power relentlessly by, only to touch down with the delicacy of a SpaceX rocket on – ah yes – the only possible ending. Whoah indeed. I wanted to give it a round of applause.

—— Spectator

Gnomon is only as large as its pages, but its pages seem like the door to a sinister Narnia … Reading Gnomon is like being an architecture critic when you suspect your reality is virtual. Its momentum is exhilarating, but frightening too. It resembles, very stylishly, a mind spinning itself insane.

—— Telegraph

A brainy, labyrinthine plot born of Dr Who and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, with a dash of EU finance, Brexit and some Snowden-esque paranoia about the pervasive surveillance of ‘the System’. A mind-bending, genre-blending fun house with a message or two.

—— Mail on Sunday

Trying to situate Gnomon in today’s literary landscape indicates how odd a figure it cuts. It has something of the large, fine-grained restlessness of David Foster Wallace, the scale and ambition of Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. But it’s considerably more gonzo than any of them. It oughtn’t to work. It does, though. Gnomon is that rare thing, a book that cannot be accurately summarised or described. It needs to be experienced. And the experience, though it sometimes threatens to overwhelm, is always readable, absorbing, thought-provoking and, in the final analysis, unlike anything else. This novel is its own thing, separated from the continent, not part of the main. Gnomon is an island. And an island you really should visit.

—— Adam Roberts , Literary Review

There is a glorious maximalism to the work of Nick Harkaway … Each novel has questioned – with admirable exuberance – one of the pillars of the novel itself … If one can level a criticism at the work of Jorge Luis Borges it would be that it is so perfectly distilled: Harkaway, on the other hand, takes the same themes and produces endless cadenzas around them. There is a brilliance to his writing, in which each idea is stretched and inverted, contorted and deformed. And he has a gift for the ingenious quip, the aphorism, the sensory simile … Gnomon is a kind of metaphysical epic … The surface sparkle belies a deep seriousness … Gnomon is a serious investigation of technological possibility.

—— Stuart Kelly , Times Literary Supplement

Opening a novel by Nick Harkaway feels like stepping into a theme park for the mind – every page you turn brings new delights for the mind and the senses. Gnomon is brilliant and terrifying, full of pleasures big and small. Basically, everything I want in a book.

—— Charles Yu, author of 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe'

This is a book that is in love with books, and no reader can help but warm to that.

—— Guardian

A bit like Terry Pratchett meets Franz Kafka … Harkaway seems like he must have a brain the size of a planet.

—— David Shrigley , Shortlist

Woven with witty allusions to everything from obscure texts to pop songs, and warning against an unthinking sacrifice of privacy to paranoia, Gnomon will appeal to fans of William Gibson and David Mitchell.

—— Metro

A novel of energy and huge ambition … that confirms the emergence of major talent.

—— SFX Magazine

A psychedelic experience.

—— Nudge

Stylishly mad

—— Daily Telegraph

A book to get lost in.

—— Observer

The great chronicler of Englishness

—— Independent

A copper bottomed masterpiece

—— Barney Norris

Coe's comic critique of a divided country dazzles . . . properly laugh-out-loud funny . . . it is also incisive and brilliant about our divided country and the deep chasms revealed by the vote to leave. Do not miss

—— The Bookseller

The first great Brexit novel

—— Sathnam Sanghera

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

—— India Knight

Jonathan Coe's Middle England is brilliantly insightful on the times we are living in

—— Mishal Husain, Books of the Year , Big Issue

Let me add to the chorus of praise for Jonathan Coe's new book Middle England. Easily my favourite of his since What a Carve Up! Which did for Thatcherism what Middle England does for Brexit

—— John Crace

An astute, enlightened and enlightening journey into the heart of our current national identity crisis. Both moving and funny. As we'd expect from Coe

—— Ben Elton

From post-industrial Birmingham to the London riots and the current political gridlock, it takes in family, literature and love in a comedy for our times

—— Guardian

Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters

—— Scotsman

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

—— India Knight

Probably the best English novelist of his generation

—— Nick Hornby

No modern novelist is better at charting the precariousness of middle-class life

—— Observer

An angry and exuberant book

—— Sunday Times on 'Number 11'

Jonathan Coe has established himself as one of the most entertaining chroniclers of our times

—— Tatler

You can't stop reading....I was haunted for days

—— Independent on 'Number 11'
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