Girl, 1983
A Novel
22 July 2025
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
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.
Reviews
"In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear and loneliness…An engrossing, intimate narrative." — Kirkus (starred review)
"Linn Ullmann’s gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling." — Deborah Levy, author of The Position of Spoons
"Linn Ullman’s writing, already distinct for its rare moral clarity, attains a new authority in Girl, 1983. It is the authority of focus, of a grip on life that grows more tenacious as its scope determinedly narrows. In the manner of Annie Ernaux, Ullman uses the act of attention as a weapon against indifference. It is as though by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to confer sanity on them. Yet there is also a brightness and generosity to her work that seems to turn its themes—the powerlessness of youth and femininity, the intermingling of memory and shame—inside out." — Rachel Cusk, author of Parade
"Girl, 1983 unearths one young woman’s exhilaration, confusion, and darkness on the cusp of adulthood, drawn inexorably to glamour, only to discover its raw agonies. Linn Ullmann is a master of calm devastation; this is a haunting book." — Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
"Linn Ullmann’s new novel, Girl, 1983, is both beautiful and unsettling. A slow exploration of the narrator’s past becomes a quiet and disturbing interrogation of the world’s treatment of young women. Here beauty is a dangerous possession, drawing its owner into silence and complicity with those who would harm her. Brava to Ullmann for bravely taking on this dark subject, one which permeates our culture." — Roxanna Robinson, author of Leaving
"This book, about how we meet and understand the powers and the powerful vulnerabilities that form and have formed us, is written with extraordinary courage and a spirit that astounds. It's a work of real strength: poetic, witty, vital, cool and fevered both at once. Girl, 1983 does more than hold the self at all its ages. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension. I think it's a masterpiece." — Ali Smith, author of Gliff
Standalone Ebook
9781324066361
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