Winter is a sequence of stand-alone pieces, written to greet the arrival of a new baby. You might call them flash fictions, although that term has a gimmicky ring that doesn’t do justice to the intricacy of Knausgaard’s style. What he’s trying to do is to draw his daughter’s attention to the weirdness and the beauty of the world, The close-up descriptions of snow, rain and the sound of forest are perfectly precise; he also ponders philosophical questions such as the relationship between the local and the universal, and, at the other end of the spectrum, the banalities of the everyday. My house is messy, your house is messy, so why ‘this shame, which flaps around in me’ when your friends call by?

Published in Winter, first published in Norwegian 2015; in English, Vintage, 2017