Welcome to America - by Linda Boström Knausgård (Paperback)

About the Book

Ellen thinks she may have killed her dad and her brother's barricaded himself in his room. KnausgOErd's novel is a scintillating portrait of a sensitive, strong-willed child in the throes of trauma, a family on the brink of implosion, and the love that threatens to tear them apart.art.

Book Synopsis

"A piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. (...) melodic, mythological, transformative, a testament to literature's powers..." Vanity Fair
Ellen has stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother's barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We're a family of light! she insists. But darkness seeps in everywhere and in their separate worlds each of them longs for togetherness.

Review Quotes

"A piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. (...) melodic, mythological, transformative, a testament to literature's powers..." --Vanity Fair

"...a taut portrait of how difficult it can be to reconcile ideals about faith and family with their messier realities. An intense, recursive book that evokes the chill despair of a Bergman film." --Kirkus Reviews

"The narrative is borderline stream-of-consciousness, with hallucinations mingling with reality, forcing readers to constantly question what they are told. Knausgård is an impressive writer, and she has created a unique, powerful lead in a world all her own." --Publishers Weekly

"In striking prose, Knausgård examines the power of silence and the complicated reality of family. A singular and thought-provoking story with a child narrator you won't soon forget. I look forward to Knausgård's next book!" --Bookriot

"Welcome to America is a slim, beautiful act of grace, a novel that moves easily through the shadows and patches of light within its characters, through truths half-glimpsed and barely acknowledged. It will remind readers of the intimate force of Ingmar Bergman's films, secrets and lies in close focus, haunting and desperately true." -- Robert J Wiersema for The Toronto Star

"Sparse, sleek and exacting...[Boström Knausgård] provides a haunting and evocative portrait of the process of trauma and the awareness of personal isolationism, even within the structures of faith and family." --Alice Martin for Shelf Awareness

"Boström Knausgård's careful exploration of mental illness is restrained and entirely unsentimental. She passes no judgment on her characters, whose pain she reveals through Ellen's musings. Her prose is unobtrusive in its simplicity and minimalism. The result is both powerful and lyrical, qualities beautifully rendered by translator Martin Aitken's concise, pared-down English text."--Deborah Bragan-Turner for Words Without Borders

"Knausgård's novel...gives voice to the uncontrollable, horrifying aspects of growing up. Ellen doesn't quite understand why her life force might be so compromised, but she does find power, pride, and a kind of freedom in her silence. Readers familiar with Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical My Struggle series will recognize Linda Boström as its author's ex-wife, adding further intrigue to this quietly bold tale of familial terror and love."--Annie Bostrom, Booklist

"Knausgård's story of a family in crisis is shocking and imaginative. Everything is written in beautiful and sparse prose which suggests that, after all, from darkness comes light." --Jury, August Prize

"Knausgård's artistry is masterful." --Bookslut

"With each sentence of her novella, Knausgaard gives a spare and poetic accounting of her narrator's silent days...Together, they mark something quite lovely." --Catherine Holmes, The Charleston Post and Courier

"Welcome to America presents itself as an étude in the musical sense of the term: a basic theme that varies to infinity, acquiring with each new variation a new unprecedented facet. A triumph." --Le Monde

"The incandescent Welcome to America allows one to discover the author's vibrant and powerful universe."--Lire"Gets you in the gut. A delirious dance." --L'Alsace Quotidien

"A tender novel about a mute girl: gentle, sensitive, minimal, concise, subtle, and brutal. This is writing as self-defense and liberation." --Volker Weidermann for Spiegel

"A daring and disturbing novel. One will not soon forget the eleven-year-old narrator and her silence." --MDR Kultur

"In her slim book, Boström Knausgård conjures a constellation reminiscent of a psychological thriller. Welcome to America is a book that masterfully describes the many nuances of inner darkness." --Austria Presse Agentur

"A short, very lyrical novel. The scenes succeed in their great universality, closely observed, wisely questioned." --Brigitte Woman

"Outstanding psychological chamber play. Linda Boström Knausgård has an incredible ability to give voice to the young narrator's haunting thoughts and she does it through such dense prose that is both simple and powerful, both tangible and poetic." --Politiken

"Boström Knausgård has her own poetic language. The imagery is just as natural and brilliant as it is mad and askew." --Dagbladet

"A great book! Linda Boström Knausgård certainly does not shy away from the dark and horrible in her family dramas. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and precise. I really love this novel." --Aftonbladet

"A book cannot, like a person, be accomplished. But Linda Boström Knausgård manages to get very close. She keeps her balance perfectly: she never judges, never justifies. She just narrates, with perfection." --Sydsvenskan

"Linda Boström Knausgård erases herself from her own writing. What remains is the girl who communicates directly with the reader in a remarkably strong voice, despite her being so quiet."--Svenska Dagbladet

"Hers is a way of writing that takes risks, without considering the consequences, heading straight for the unknown. Reading her novella is like experiencing a condensed depiction of decay, a decay that also carries a light so strong that it is like standing in the middle of a ray of sunshine." --Jönköpings-Poste

About the Author

LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD is a Swedish author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for national radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States. Welcome to America, her second novel, was nominated for the prestigious Swedish August Prize and the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize in her home country, and was also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award in the United States. October Child became a bestseller in Sweden and throughout Scandinavia, where it was published to great critical acclaim.