Welcome to America

Welcome to America is a slim, beautiful act of grace, a novel that moves easily through the shadows and patches of light within its characters, through truths half-glimpsed and barely acknowledged. It will remind readers of the intimate force of Ingmar Bergman's films, secrets and lies in close focus, haunting and desperately true. -- Robert J Wiersema for The Toronto Star A piercing story of a girl who responds to trauma by mustering the most powerful weapon available to her: silence. (...) melodic, mythological, transformative, a testament to literature's powers... --Vanity Fair ...a taut portrait of how difficult it can be to reconcile ideals about faith and family with their messier realities. An intense, recursive book that evokes the chill despair of a Bergman film. --Kirkus Reviews The narrative is borderline stream-of-consciousness, with hallucinations mingling with reality, forcing readers to constantly question what they are told. Knausgard is an impressive writer, and she has created a unique, powerful lead in a world all her own. --Publishers Weekly Sparse, sleek and exacting...[Bostroem Knausgard] provides a haunting and evocative portrait of the process of trauma and the awareness of personal isolationism, even within the structures of faith and family. --Alice Martin for Shelf Awareness Bostroem Knausgard's careful exploration of mental illness is restrained and entirely unsentimental. She passes no judgment on her characters, whose pain she reveals through Ellen's musings. Her prose is unobtrusive in its simplicity and minimalism. The result is both powerful and lyrical, qualities beautifully rendered by translator Martin Aitken's concise, pared-down English text. --Deborah Bragan-Turner for Words Without Borders Knausgard's story of a family in crisis is shocking and imaginative. Everything is written in beautiful and sparse prose which suggests that, after all, from darkness comes light. --Jury, August Prize Knausgard's artistry is masterful. --Bookslut Welcome to America presents itself as an etude in the musical sense of the term: a basic theme that varies to infinity, acquiring with each new variation a new unprecedented facet. A triumph. --Le Monde The incandescent Welcome to America allows one to discover the author's vibrant and powerful universe. --Lire Gets you in the gut. A delirious dance. --L'Alsace Quotidien A tender novel about a mute girl: gentle, sensitive, minimal, concise, subtle, and brutal. This is writing as self-defense and liberation. --Volker Weidermann for Spiegel A daring and disturbing novel. One will not soon forget the eleven-year-old narrator and her silence. --MDR Kultur In her slim book, Bostroem Knausgard conjures a constellation reminiscent of a psychological thriller. Welcome to America is a book that masterfully describes the many nuances of inner darkness. --Austria Presse Agentur (APA) A short, very lyrical novel. The scenes succeed in their great universality, closely observed, wisely questioned. -- Brigitte Woman Outstanding psychological chamber play. Linda Bostroem Knausgard has an incredible ability to give voice to the young narrator's haunting thoughts and she does it through such dense prose that is both simple and powerful, both tangible and poetic. --Politiken Bostroem Knausgard has her own poetic language. The imagery is just as natural and brilliant as it is mad and askew. --Dagbladet A great book! Linda Bostroem Knausgard certainly does not shy away from the dark and horrible in her family dramas. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and precise. I really love this novel. --Aftonbladet A book cannot, like a person, be accomplished. But Linda Bostroem Knausgard manages to get very close. She keeps her balance perfectly: she never judges, never justifies. She just narrates, with perfection. --Sydsvenskan Linda Bostroem Knausgard erases herself from her own writing. What remains is the girl who communicates directly with the reader in a remarkably strong voice, despite her being so quiet. --Svenska Dagbladet Hers is a way of writing that takes risks, without considering the consequences, heading straight for the unknown. Reading her novella is like experiencing a condensed depiction of decay, a decay that also carries a light so strong that it is like standing in the middle of a ray of sunshine. --Joenkoepings-Poste