Girl, 1983.
- The_Secret_Bookreview
- May 10
- 2 min read
By Linn Ulmann.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann is a raw and haunting exploration of memory, identity, and the enduring impact of buried secrets.
Set across the shifting landscapes of Oslo, New York, and Paris, Ullmann’s narrative begins on a cold winter night in 1983.
A sixteen-year-old girl, lost and vulnerable, wanders the unfamiliar streets of Paris. In her pocket, she carries a scrap of paper with the address of K, a photographer thirty years her senior. This brief encounter will leave an indelible mark on her, its significance lingering for decades.
Now, almost forty years later, the woman she has become finds her carefully constructed life begins to unravel. Compelled to revisit the past, she sets out to piece together the fragments of a memory that refuses to remain forgotten.
Ullmann’s prose delicately crisscrosses time, mapping the tension between the young girl’s disoriented vulnerability and the adult woman’s introspective search for meaning. As the layers of her past are gradually uncovered, themes of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness emerge with aching clarity.
Ullmann’s writing, both lyrical and unflinching, elevates Girl, 1983 into something more than a straightforward narrative; it becomes a profound meditation on the fragility of memory, the passing of time, and the quiet reckoning with trauma.
Like her landmark work, Unquiet, this novel challenges the boundaries of genre, blending fiction with introspection and offering a deeply moving account of one woman’s struggle to comprehend a moment that defined her.
Elegant, evocative, and courageous, Girl, 1983 lingers long after the final page, leaving readers with an unshakable sense of its emotional resonance and truth.
Thank you so much to the team at Penguin Books for allowing me the opportunity to receive and read this advance reader copy!
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