Welcome to America. Linda Boström Knausgård
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A family on the brink of silence
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. Welcome to America is an exquisite 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.
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Praise for Welcome to America
‘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
‘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, 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-Posten
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LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD (Sweden) is an author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for Swedish radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was awarded the Mare Kandre Prize and shortlisted for the Swedish Radio Novel Award 2014. Welcome to America, her second novel, has been awarded the prestigious Swedish August Prize and nominated for the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize.
MARTIN AITKEN is a full-time translator of Scandinavian literature. Working mainly from Danish and more recently Norwegian, he has translated the works of writers such as Kim Leine, Helle Helle, Peter Høeg, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. His recent translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. Welcome to America is his first book from Swedish.
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AUTHOR
‘Silence, or not speaking, is a theme I recognize from my own childhood. To speak and then suddenly not speak―I’ve experienced that. As a child I fantasized about not speaking when I was angry at my mother: “I won’t say a word, not a word!” But I didn’t have the strength that Ellen in the book has. I held out two or three days at most, and it felt good. But then life carried on. After I coined the phrase “It’s a long time already since I stopped talking” the story just fell into place.’
TRANSLATOR
‘Boström Knausgård’s high-tension prose crackles with electricity. Strobe-like, her sentences illuminate the shadowlands of grief and insecurity as she sensitively probes the emotions of childhood vulnerability, loneliness, and longing. Her uncomplicated sentence structures and straightforward lexis belie great richnesses of meaning. The task is to carry that over into an English that retains the delicate hues of Scandinavian simplicity without compromising its own forms of expression. For this is a remarkable portrait that continues to shower its sparks long after reading.’
PUBLISHER
‘Boström Knausgård’s writing is hypnotic: personal, tight, and otherworldly. It comes from a place deep inside the belly of adolescence, and screams―albeit melodically, gorgeously―about the painful passage out of it that is more commonly known as growing up. This book is a door that opens onto an extraordinary female mind.’
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LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD
WELCOME TO AMERICA
Translated from the Swedish
by Martin Aitken
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
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Published in the USA in 2019 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2019 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Linda Boström Knausgård, 2016
English translation copyright © Martin Aitken, 2019
Cover image © Dana Menussi/Getty
Author portrait © Christina Ottosson Öygarden
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-041-2
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-049-8
First published as Välkommen till Amerika in Sweden in 2016 by Modernista. Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency ApS, Copenhagen.
The cost of this translation