Repetition: A Novel

One of the foremost writers of her generation explores the strength and pain of being young

As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.

It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent,...