Radical but full of hope ... we really can choose our mental health and that of our children

the nation's shrink

James is charting the new frontiers in psychology

Quietly illuminates Knausgaard's profound gift for making the reader see the world in fresh and unpredictable ways.

This book is full of wonders… Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard’s patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted.

Autumn… returns to the scintillating tangent that characterized the early volumes of My Struggle, when he still allowed his midlife self airtime. On each subject [Knausgaard] combines an almost comically microscopic focus with a stealthy flair for producing a bigger picture that is all the more arresting for arriving by surprise.

It is when elements of autobiography creep in that the book comes most alive, as when he writes about choosing his father’s wellington boots as a memento after his death.

Knausgaard writes about the textures of ordinariness with a microscopic focus that’s both wondrous and absurd… There are blissful glimpses of nature’s mystery and balance.

Having given us his saga of experience, these are Knausgaard’s Songs of Innocence… The tension for the reader lies in watching the author navigate his way from the banal into the celestial otherness of the thing he is encountering… Knausgaard sees the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.

…the modest ambitions of Autumn - ‘to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap’ - add up to a phenomenological rescue mission, one the writer undertakes on behalf of his daughter, but also of himself and his reader. Day by day, radiantly, the mission succeeds.

There are gorgeous, poetic observations on almost every page.

Knausgaard’s sentences, as long as waves, use the plainest, least literary language. You paddle out unsuspecting. This is easy, you think, striking out. But Knausgaard writes by undertow. Turn round and you are alone, far out in the drowning solitudes… It is truly hopeful and this, for Knausgaard, is a departure.

Taking the old repetitive elements of life, Knausgaard’s detailed observations open our eyes to their unexpected yet remarkable qualities.

In these secular meditations, Knausgaard scratches away at the ordinary to reach the sublime – finding what’s in the picture, and what’s hidden

Knausgaard is an acute, sometimes squirmingly honest analyst of domesticity and his relationship to his family.

Very intimate and full of love

I am impressed by his responsiveness, the nuanced intelligence with which he speaks.

Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word

What he makes me see is how the personal is a possession and that this is especially true for everyone involved in the Bataclan tragedy because the personal was – and still is – in danger of being swamped by the public story of international terrorism.

He had deliberately retreated from the world that was talking incessantly about the slaughter… If Antoine refused to give his hate to the men who killed his wife and so many others, he also refuses to give them space in his life and that of his now two-year-old son.

He looked at the words on the screen as the news networks competed to find words to describe the events: massacre, carnage, bloodbath. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t because of Melvil… Initially resistant to spending time with fellow mourners, Antoine discovered that there is a kind of brotherhood, a feeling of recognition, that can provide consolation.

[A] beautifully written memoir… It’s the hardest book you can pick up this year, but also the most affecting.

It is a personal account of the aftershock following the atrocity. Yet there is no gore, no torture, no scene-setting, no facts putting the Isis-claimed retaliation in context, no second-hand reports of what happened inside the theatre… Instead, it is simple and immediate, and is all about love and loss… This book may also be Leiris’s way of just holding it together. One feels he is writing as the man he was before that November day that changed everything… It is the literary equivalent of smelling her clothes every night before attempting to sleep.

A book for our times.

This book is a love song to Hélène, a promise to Melvil and a resolution not to be defeated by chaos and barbarity. It is a stunning mission statement.

This heartbreaking and beautifully written memoir lays bare the terrible chronology of grief, but it is also a testimony to the power of love and hope.

It’s an agonising account of those first few days, in which the lives of father and son changed forever. Despite the haste with which it was written, every word is chosen with care and charged with meaning, a raw and honest memoir of grief which can’t fail to move all who read it.