The Morning Star kept readers up all night, immersed with nine characters whose individual lives are heightened by the sudden appearance of a blazing new star. The Wolves of Eternity, set between Norway and Russia, is an intimate journey into the experiences of two estranged half-siblings in the decades before the star rises. Now, in The Third Realm, the effects of the star are felt around the world, as people start to reckon with what it might possibly mean.
Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands and an online bank of thousands of people's dreams - the star is back, and the limitless scale and ambition of Karl Ove's new universe is clear. This is life, death, the human condition, and the opportunity to bring readers in on the real-time creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.
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