Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. She is 16 years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, 30 years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begin to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, GIRL, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, UNQUIET, Linn Ullmann’s narrator continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret.

He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children. Every summer, since she was a little girl, she visits him at his beloved stony house. Now that she’s grown up and he’s in his late 80s, he envisions a book about old age that they will write together. When she finally comes to the island, bringing her tape recorder with her, old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. UNQUIET follows the narrator as she unearths these taped conversations seven years later. Swept into memory, she reimagines the story of a father, a mother and a girl --- a child who can’t wait to grow up and parents who would rather be children.

When Milla is hired as a nanny to allow Siri to work her long hours at the restaurant she owns and her husband, Jon, to supposedly meet the deadline on his book, life in their idyllic summer community takes a dire turn. One rainy July night, Milla disappears without a trace. After her remains are discovered and a suspect is identified, everyone who had any connection with her feels implicated in the tragedy and haunted by what they could have done to prevent it.