Audiobooks by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Brought to you by Penguin. The future is no more, and eternity has begun. It's 1986 and a nuclear reactor has exploded in Chernobyl. Syvert Løyning returns home from military service to live with his mother and brother on the outskirts of a town in Southern Norway. One night, he dreams of his late father, and can't shake him from his mind. Searching through his father's belongings for clues and connections, he finds a cache of letters that lead to the Soviet Union. In present-day Russia, Alevtina is trying to balance work and family. She has always sought the answers to life's big questions, but is preoccupied with care of her young son. Her friend Vasilisa offers some nourishment: she is writing a book about an ancient feature of Russian culture, the belief in eternal life. Meantime, Alevtina is heading towards a meeting that will redraw the contours of her world. A searching and humane novel, The Wolves of Eternity is an intimate journey into the experiences of a half-brother and half-sister in their two different - yet deeply connected - lives. The second novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard's extraordinary new series, it expands the universe of The Morning Star in the decades before the blazing and mysterious star descends. ©2023 Karl Ove Knausgaard (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini, Gilli Messer, Natasha Soudek, Vas Eli (Narrator)

Audiobook

So Much Longing in So Little Space: The art of Edvard Munch

Random House presents the audiobook edition of So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, read by Matthew Waterson. In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch's painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world's most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Matthew Waterson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Inadvertent

The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University. Administered by Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the series publishes works based on the lecture given by the event's keynote speaker.In Inadvertent, internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard reveals his beginnings as a writer and his literary influences, his creative development and his struggles. But this text is more than a window into the writer's frame of mind. It's also a glimmering meditation on literature and creativity-on its limitations and its freedoms. From Jorge Luis Borges to Edvard Munch, the text explores Knausgaard's relationship to art that's moved him, and how that art situates itself in our culture. The text is both biographical and philosophical, and raises as many questions as it provides answers.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

My Struggle, Book 6

My Struggle introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues-death, love, art, fear-and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

Summer

In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply. My Struggle: Book 2 is at heart a love story?the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his second wife. But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of city life keeping him from (and filling) his novel. It is a brilliant work that emphatically delivers on the unlikely promise that many hundreds of pages later readers will be left breathlessly demanding more.

Ingvild Burkey, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

Spring

Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles. "Today is Wednesday the thirteenth of April 2016, it is twelve minutes to eleven, and I have just finished writing this book for you. What happened that summer nearly three years ago, and its repercussions, are long since over. Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for." Spring follows a father and his newborn daughter through one day in April, from sunrise to sunset. A day filled with everyday routine, the beginnings of life and its light, but also its deep struggles and its darkness.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

Autumn

Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. With acute sensitivity he describes daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention; this is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

Winter

The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter 2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time. In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays-to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze. Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

Autumn

From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons 28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you. I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living. Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice-the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3

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.Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrating. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

My Struggle, Book 5

The fifth book of Knausgaard's powerful My Struggle series is written with tremendous force and sincerity. As a nineteen-year-old, Karl Ove moves to Bergen and invests all of himself in his writing. But his efforts get the opposite effect - he wants it so much that he gets writer's block. At the same time, he sees his friends, one-by-one, publish their debuts. He suspects that he will never get anything published. Book Five is also a book about strong new friendships and a shattering love affair. Then one day Karl Ove reaches two crucial points in his life: his father dies, and shortly thereafter, he completes his first novel.

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook