Girl, 1983

This stunning novel explores desire and anxiety, beauty and youth, memory and power.

“By writing down what happened, by telling the story as truthfully as I can, I’m trying to bring them together into one body—the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don’t know if it can be done.”

Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. 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.

Set in Oslo, New York, and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, Unquiet, Linn Ullmann’s narrator continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris.

Girl, 1983 is a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.