The Morning Star

**A** New York Times **Notable Book** • **One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.” —Dwight Garner, **New York Times** “A ravishing form of theologically infused fabulism. . . . This combination of the universal and the intimate enables the novel to approach weighty subjects—death and dying, belief and despair—with both the thrust of a suspense narrative and the depth of a philosophical inquiry.” **—The New Yorker** 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.