An intense and arresting love story

An outstanding, compelling drama from Downham

It's one of the most powerful books we've read in an age. Even after finishing, it lingered with us for days . . . Jenny Downham's novel blows other books out of the water

I loved it . . . Beautifully written with a painful but penetrating awareness

A tale of love across the social divide in coastal Norfolk, with the edge of a crime novel . . . Split loyalties and the chasm between the young couple's life experiences make their enduring relationship a triumph. Their credible and tender sexual encounter is the calm before the storm, as for Romeo and Juliet

Knausgaard's Proustian attention to detail and scrupulous analysis of emotional nuance is almost maddening – but ultimately magnificent

Knausgaard continues masterfully

One of the most anticipated books of the year (the decade)

His devotees gobble each new volume with an eagerness previously reserved only for box sets of Borgen

Knausgaard transforms the personal and mundane into the universal and perennially significant... There is such depth of feeling beneath the vibrant exterior, such sense of the goodness present in human existence

Accessibly and punchily written, an intimate, determined and ultimately successful attempt to shape the tiny mundanities of life into something quite unexpectedly beautiful, compelling and substantial

Knausgaard is a writer strong enough to survive the hype... A masterpiece for the age of the selfie... Brutally frank about the frustrations of marriage, work and parenthood, it's often horrifying and deeply funny

Compelling

Astounding... A work of such sincerity that, to paraphrase Baudelaire, the paper shrivels and flares at the touch of his fiery pen

Free-form, fear-filled, densely descriptive…Norway’s biggest literary star since Ibsen… [Knausgaard] has no obvious superiors among the writers now available to an English-reading public