Linn Ullman, the Norwegian author’s new novel Girl, 1983, gathers fragments of a trip she took to Paris, on a Winter’s night in 1983, then sixteen-year-old girl, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior, Ullmann creates a captivating portraits of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear, and loneliness with intimate narrative. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begin to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. It is as though by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to make peace with her past.

Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983, explores a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness, through the layers of memory and oblivion.  

Girl, 1983, by Linn Ullmann, W.W. Norton & company, 272 pages.