The Third Realm

Author Karl Ove Knausgaard
Narrator various
Publisher Random House
Run Time 16 hours and 48 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Fantasy, Fiction in translation, Horror and supernatural fiction, Magical realism, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: Interior life.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

If no one ever died, what would happen then?

For several days, a bright new star in the sky above Norway has blazed over the restless lives of those below. Tove, an artist, is consumed by intense creativity as she spirals towards psychosis. Line falls in love with a musician named Valdemar and is lured to a secret death metal gig in a remote forest. Geir, a policeman, is investigating a ritual murder but chances upon something more horrifying even than the bodies in the trees – the last bodies he sees, because, as undertaker Syvert is the first to realise, people have stopped dying since the star appeared.

What is haunting the world – and why?

With The Third Realm, Karl Ove Knausgaard expands the spellbinding universe of The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, as a cast of new and familiar characters begins to tell the story in the round. With each thrilling page, the possibility emerges that a malign force is at large, and that perhaps no one is beyond its reach.

PRAISE FOR KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD:

'Addictive' Daily Telegraph

'Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling' New York Times

‘Casts an existential spell…captivating… Big themes — the cosmos, death and resurrection — are amplified through ghostly visitations, doppelgänger lives and the question of what, if anything, lies beyond human existence’ Financial Times

© Karl Ove Knausgaard 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Critics Review

I still can’t get enough…The compulsion to keep reading springs from the author’s ability to transcribe patterns of thinking. His faith that access to other people’s consciousness might make us feel less alone remains a profound — and distinctly literary — conviction

The Times

Unsettling, disturbing and riveting... As we become privy to the characters musings on philosophy, religion, art, neuroscience and love, they grow ever more compelling…. as accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama series. There is no writer I would rather devour

Spectator

Breathtaking…The book opens and closes with Tove…her mix of despair and insight, humour and visionary brilliance turns out to be what these novels need most… [The Third Realm] has such an electrifyingly capacious sense of what the novel can be

Guardian

One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. Novel by novel, Knausgaard is replenishing some feral charge to the world. This book made me afraid of the dark again.

Washington Post

Intense… The presence of a detective investigating a ritual murder injects surprising pace, while distinctive meditations on mortality, the divine and mental illness prove enthralling

Mail on Sunday

If you love Knausgaard…you’ll devour The Third Realm… it’s ferociously readable… I still can’t get enough

The Times

A visionary epic… an exemplary masterclass in what fiction can offer

Guardian

The Third Realm… is primarily a meditation on the ordinary… compelling… At every turn…we see Knausgaard’s relish in depicting the unreliability of people’s thoughts

Literary Review

Readers who come to this book first will find an entertaining story about people sorting through spiritual, domestic, and emotional confusion. But those who’ve read the prior novels will get a deeper sense of just how fascinating, frustrating, and unknowable we can be to each other, and the consequences of that disconnection.

Kirkus (starred review)

[In] The Third Realm… Knausgaard unspools a philosophical cop drama shot through with shivery horror… In 2018 he said he’d been binge-watching Twin Peaks. No surprise that that show’s eerie tonal swerves are exquisitely channelled here

Daily Mail

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