The Third Realm TR by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2025-10-07)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 512 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781039009462
• Item Weight: 408.24 grams
• Dimensions: 21.26 x 13.84 x 2.62 cm

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times • A kaleidoscopic novel about ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change, from bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard.

“The people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona . . . Enthralling . . . you can’t stop reading.” —Lev Grossman, The Atlantic

“One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. Novel by novel, Knausgaard is replenishing some feral charge to the world.” —Brandon Taylor, The Washington Post

For several days, a strange and bright new star in the sky above Norway has sown an unyielding sense of foreboding, of agitation, and of fear. Tove, a painter on holiday with her family, has spiraled into a psychosis that stirs her into a flurry of unbridled creativity. Geir, a policeman who has been investigating a grisly triple murder, comes to a sinister revelation he must keep to himself. Nineteen-year-old Line falls in love with the lead singer of a metal band and is lured into a secret and frightening world.

But most bewildering, and disquieting, is the discovery made by Syvert, an undertaker: since the star has appeared, no one has died.

In The Third Realm, Karl Ove Knausgaard returns to the spellbinding world of The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, as a cast of new and familiar characters continue to reckon with the meaning of this star. What is haunting them, and why?

As supernatural forces collide with the mundanities of the everyday, and the threshold between life and death becomes diffuse, people are forced to live their lives as before while the world around them slowly changes in inexplicable ways. Piercing through human existence into the bestial and phantasmagorical, Knausgaard flings open the gates to our most distressing neuroses and forces us to ask: What happens if the dark forces in the world are set free?

About the Author

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. The My Struggle cycle of novels has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it has appeared.

MARTIN AITKEN's translations of Scandinavian literature number some thirty-five books. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International DUBLIN Literary Award (2017) and the U.S. National Book Awards (2018), as well as the 2021 International Booker Prize. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019.