Before You Sleep

The acclaimed debut novel of passion and subtlety that links three generations of eccentric, formidable women.
 
Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is both playful and melancholy—a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother Anni, alluring, manipulative, and melodramatic; her sister Julie, a wife and mother nearly undone by suspicions of her husband’s infidelity; her aunt Selma, “the world’s angriest old woman”; and her soldier grandmother June, who bets that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all. Inventive and wise, funny and disquieting, Before You Sleep marks the arrival of a gifted new literary voice.
 
“Ullmann creates such a powerful mood of intimacy here that the reader feels like a part of the family.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Ullmann’s imagination . . . is formed by a love of the intricacies of family life, of the ties that bind.”—The New Yorker

Born in 1966, Linn Ullmann has lived most of her life in New York City and Oslo. A graduate of New York University, Ullmann has worked as a literary critic at one of Norway's leading newspapers since 1993. She currently lives in Oslo with her eight year old son.
Tiina Nunnally is an award-winning translator of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. Her translation for Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, won the Lewis Galantiere Prize, given to the American Translators Association.