The Third Realm

From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, an expansive, kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses towards light and dark that live in all of us

One summer day, while on vacation with her husband and children, the artist Tove begins to hear voices. These voices promise to grant her an extraordinary power—but also demand a sacrifice in exchange. Gaute, a schoolteacher, is tormented by thoughts of his wife Kathrine’s infidelity, while one of his students begins to be similarly possessed by intense nightmares. The architect Helge is racked by sudden, intense guilt about a car crash he witnessed forty years ago. Nineteen year-old Line falls in love with Valdemar, the charismatic front man of a black metal band, and finds herself drawn into the band’s strange, ritualistic world. And the police officer Geir, while investigating a horrific triple murder, stumbles upon a theory too inexplicable to share with anyone.

Uniting these seemingly disparate lives is the presence of a blazing new star in the sky, which seems to have shifted the world in ways that none of them can understand. Most unsettling of all is the undertaker Syvert’s realization that no one—not a single person—has died since the star’s appearance days ago. It’s as if the world is haunted—but by whom, and why?

Building on the worlds of The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm is an eerie and extraordinary new novel from Karl Ove Knausgaard—a meditation on ordinary life in a time of creeping, undeniable change from one of the world’s most inimitable writers.