A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 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.

“Powerfully alive . . . Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book.” —James Wood, The New Yorker (selected as one of the Books of the Year)

“A fantastic novel . . . I cannot say anything other than that I am looking forward desperately to the rest of it.” —Dagsavisen (Norway)

“Knausgaard's thinking is magnificently unbridled.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (germany)

“Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality.” —La Repubblica (Italy)

“I can't stop, I want to stop, I can't stop, just one more page, then I will cook dinner, just one more page . . .” —Västerbottens-kuriren (Sweden)