Don't let his status as highbrow crush du jour put you off: like WG Sebald in the 1990s and Roberto Bolaño in the 2000s, Karl Ove Knausgaard is a writer strong enough to survive the hype. Sebald wrote about the Holocaust; Bolaño drew on a real-life murder epidemic in a Mexican factory town; Knausgaard writes about Knausgaard. His sprawling six-part memoir-novel My Struggle (Min kamp in the original Norwegian) is a masterpiece for the age of the selfie, seesawing through the author's first 40 years on a tide of exhaustive, purgative recollection. Brutally frank about the frustrations of marriage, work and parenthood, it's often horrifying and deeply funny.
Instalments have been appearing in English annually since 2012. Part one, A Death in the Family , recounted the author's rural adolescence before exposing the squalor in which his father passed his final years. "Dad", otherwise unidentified for legal reasons, was a teacher and local councillor who dropped dead when Knausgaard was 29, following a midlife crisis that saw him change his name and start a new family before he turned to drink and moved back in with his own mother, also an alcoholic. After his death, Knausgaard and his older brother discover piles of clothes caked in excrement, empty bottles and half-eaten ready meals on every surface.
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