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3.5 

The Morning Star

By Karl Ove Knausgaard & Martin Aitken
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard & Martin Aitken digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A New York Times Notable Book 

One of NPR's Best Books of 2021

"Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

The international bestseller from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless


One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes. 
 
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.
 
Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead? 
 
The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates our world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.

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213 Reviews

3.5
“This book asks more questions than it gives answers. At 663 pages, this brick of a book is the first installment of a series of 5, and it gives us vignettes of a handful of people's lives around the time a big burning star appears in the sky. Nobody can explain this phenomenon and nobody knows where it came from. But life goes on, and strange events begin to occur. A 20 year old girl with no friends who tries to make people like her, a female priest is contemplating her marriage, a journalist is getting a scoop on a horrible murder, a nurse is working the night shift, just to name a few. Some stuck out to me more than others, but they all challenge their inner demons and experience things out of the ordinary. Some of the characters' lives intersect, but some might never meet. This one is hard for me to review because there is a whole picture there, but I can't see it. I can only see fragments and I'm not really sure what l'm looking at. But Knausgards writing is so addictive in a weird way and I binged this in 2 days! It's a big book, so l was clearly enticed. There's a lot of philosophical thinking and wonder, not just about the star, but on life in general, on death, time and space. If you enjoy philosophizing, then there's plenty of material to help you out here. But if you're more into a story told in the traditional sense with a beginning, middle and end, then this is not it. I kind of want to head straight for the next book, but I know it's not going to pick up where it left off or give me any answers.”

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