Unquiet

Inspired by tape-recorded conversations with her late father, a woman reflects on her childhood in an unusual family in this acclaimed biographical novel.

“I’ve long admired Linn Ullmann’s fiction, and Unquiet is her masterpiece. Based on her upbringing as the child of two great artists, it is the portrait of complex loves; of a youth divided and inspired by diametrically opposed creative influences; and of the ravages of age. Calm yet fierce, exquisitely rendered, this novel imprints itself indelibly-as if you, too, had been there.”—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl

He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children. Every summer, since she was a little girl, she visits him at his beloved stony house surrounded by woods, poppies, and the Baltic Sea. Now that she’s grown up and he’s in his late eighties, he envisions a book about old age. He worries that he’s losing his language, his memory, his mind. Growing old is hard work, he says. They will write it together. She will ask the questions. He will answer them.

When she finally comes to the island, bringing her tape recorder with her, old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen.

Unquiet follows the narrator as she unearths these taped conversations seven years later. Swept into memory, she reimagines the story of a father, a mother, and a girl-a child who can’t wait to grow up and parents who would rather be children.

A heartbreaking and darkly funny depiction of the intricacies of family, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old. Linn Ullmann nimbly blends memoir and fiction in her most inventive novel yet, weaving a luminous meditation on language, mourning, and the many narratives that make up a life.

“A brilliant meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of memory.... Gorgeous and heartbreaking.”—KirkusReviews (starred review)

“Spellbinding.... Echoing Duras’s The Lover in its blurring of the real and the imagined as well as in its obsessive attention to detail, this is a striking book about the enduring love between parents and children, and the fierce attachments that bind them even after death.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)