The School of Night - by Karl Ove Knausgaard Hardcover

Book Synopsis

London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all.

Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography; he knows that he and his art are destined for more. His family never understood him, and his fellow photography students bore him. But when he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible--as long as he is willing to sacrifice everything and stop at nothing.

Twenty-four years later, Kristian sees his dreams come to fruition when a major retrospective of his work is held in New York City. As his past catches up to him, Kristian's world begins to crumble. Success comes at a price, but is he prepared to pay it?

In a thrilling twist on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Karl Ove Knausgaard masterfully spins a cautionary tale about the lengths that we will go to achieve success--and how far we are willing to fall. His most daring and macabre novel yet, The School of Night is an indelible tale about dark temptations and moral depravity, and what we forget when we bargain with the devil.

Review Quotes

"Ingenious . . . Knausgaard masterfully charts his antihero's ascending ambition and the encroaching forces that eventually snuff it out. It's a remarkable addition to an exciting and disturbing series." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Inspired . . . a damned masterpiece." --The Times (UK)

"Riveting . . . This fourth novel in Knausgaard's Morning Star sextet squarely inhabits the series's prevailing mood: realism undercut by a hint of the preternatural. . . . In Martin Aitken's translation, the prose is fluent and nimble, the imagery possessed of a steely melancholia." --The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"Knausgaard has surpassed even his phenomenally high standards with his latest novel. This dark and macabre offering is incredibly addictive . . . an intense but hugely rewarding read." --The Daily Mirror (UK)

"Sinister and surreal . . . a parable of ambition, told with epic heft--and a decent place to start if you've been curious about this writer but never yet read him." --The Daily Mail (UK)

"An addictive and eerie reading experience." --The Guardian (UK)

"I put down this book only to eat and sleep. Knausgaard has produced another addictive psychological thriller--by turns exciting, entertaining, and tragic." --The Spectator (UK)

"Engrossing . . . Deftly translated by Martin Aitken . . . The School of Night is not only a portrait of the artist as a young man but also a chronicle of a death foretold. . . . you can't fail to read on." --The Daily Telegraph (UK)

"The School Of Night is another startling, gripping entry in Karl Ove Knausgaard's Morning Star series. I love spending time in this ripe, mysterious, unsettling, thought provoking, unpredictable and darkly entertaining world Knausgaard is in the process of creating." --Colin Barrett, Booker longlisted author of Wild Houses

"There is nothing in contemporary publishing to remotely compare to Knausgaard's Morning Star series. Knausgaard has always been brilliant on families and the domestic, on the minutiae of the everyday and the quiet, lonely rituals and habits of personality. But in combining this with elements of genre and even pulp fiction-crime-thriller, horror and the occult-he has unleashed something entirely new, an antic and almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life. There is something obliterative about its intensity; I read hundreds of pages on a bus journey in slow-moving traffic, completely oblivious to everything around me. The first of the series set in London, and the first to follow a single character throughout, The School of Night is by turns bleak, funny and horrifying, but never less than utterly captivating. Knausgaard seems to have struck on an endlessly generative seam, resulting in an almost deranged hypergraphia, and there appears no limit to where he may take us next." --Martin MacInnes, the Booker longlisted author of In Ascension

"The School of Night is a good place to start for anyone who hasn't read Knausgaard before." --NRK (UK)

"A provocative novel about ambition and morality." --i (UK)

About the Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard's first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics' Prize, and his second, A Time for Everything, was longlisted for the 2010 International Dublin Literary Award. The My Struggle cycle of novels has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it has appeared. His work is published in thirty-five languages.

Martin Aitken's translations of Scandinavian literature number some thirty-five books. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2018 U.S. National Book Award, as well as the 2021 International Booker Prize. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019.