Welcome to America

• Sparse, poetic and shocking story of a family in crisis • Linda Boström Knausgård was married to the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård, one of the highest-selling European authors in English translation, until November 2016. They lived in Sweden and have four children. They still edit each other’s work. • The American reader is already deeply familiar with the most intimate details of Linda’s life, who features prominently in Karl Ove’s autobiographical series My Struggle, with the volume A Man in Love covering the darker side of marriage and of relationships • In an interview with The Times (UK), Linda says “I married the world’s most indiscreet man.” • Translated into 10 languages • Translator Martin Aitken recently translated Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. • The struggle between silence and love is a recurrent theme in Boström Knausgård’s novels. In Welcome to America, the main character Ellen stops speaking after the death of her depressed, violent father, and though her mother is pained by it, she lets her be: “So she gets a place that she didn’t have before. A place to be in her world.” When she is silent, things for Ellen somehow become clearer and easier, and her silence prevents her from getting herself into the trouble she sometimes got herself into at school: “It feels like a good place to be.” • Welcome to America is semi-autobiographical, as Linda, daughter of an actress herself, stopped speaking as a child, albeit only for a couple of days. • Linda, who considers herself “a very quiet person” says about her reoccurring theme of silence: “It provokes a lot of reactions. It turns into a space that others want to fill perhaps by speaking even more. It’s hard to cope with silence.”