The End

The extraordinary final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental ‘My Struggle’ series. In ‘My Struggle’, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines with ruthless, unsparing rigour his life, his ambitions and frailties, his uncertainties and doubts, and his relationships with friends and exes, his wife and children, his mother and father. It is an opus in which life is described in all its nuances from moments of great drama to the most trivial everyday details. It is also a project that is full of risk, where the borders between private and public worlds cross, not without cost for the author himself and the people portrayed. The End, the sixth and final book in the sequence, is a masterstroke of retrospection as the author reflects back on the personal fallout from the earlier volumes. As Knausgaard faces growing literary acclaim and the often shattering repercussions that come with it, so he must also consider the challenge of autobiography itself becoming a catalyst in the progress and experience of real-life events. Beginning with A Death in the Family, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sequence of novels – collectively named ‘My Struggle’ – has become an internationally acclaimed phenomenon. Described by the Guardian as 'perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times' the series has been heralded as a new kind of autobiographical fiction. Brave, bold and painfully, unreservedly honest, it’s a series that breaks down the boundaries between author and subject, creator and subject, fiction and fact. A book about literature itself and its relationship with reality, The End is a fitting finale to one of literature’s boldest and most influential modern experiments, the capstone on a magnificent achievement.