ABOUT
THE BOOK

A beautifully rendered, keenly detailed, and sexually frank novel about motherhood and marriage, love and infidelity. Hailed by European critics as “a real masterpiece,” Linn Ullmann’s debut novel spans three generations in the life of a Norwegian family dominated by its eccentric, formidable women whose passions and prejudices have formed an intricate web that bonds grandmother to mother and mother to child.

Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep ranges from present-day Oslo to 1930’s Brooklyn to tell the story of the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is at once playful and melancholy, candid and elusive – a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother, Anni, the golden-haired, green-eyed virtuoso of manipulation, impossible to resist, with a seemingly endless arsenal of melodrama at her disposal; her sister Julie, a wife and mother undone by suspicions of her husband’s infidelity; her aunt Selma, “the world’s angriest old woman”; and her grandmother June, a damn good soldier who’s willing to bet a hundred kroner that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all.

Linn Ullmann’s marvellously accomplished and assured novel, already an international sensation, is inventive and wise, funny and disquieting. It is a daring and mature literary work that marks the arrival of a genuinely gifted new voice.