Full of desperate longing: Unquiet, by Linn Ullmann, reviewed

The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live mostly apart —the former in Sweden, the latter in Norway or New York — and the trio fails to bond: ‘It was never us three.’

Her famous father is a migratory sage with ‘a unique talent for partings’, obsessively orderly and punctual but happy to let this youngest child (of nine, by five wives, and the girl’s unmarried mother) grow up ‘without any plan or direction’. Her mother, often dubbed the father’s ‘muse’ (though never by the father), fills the planet’s screens with beauty ‘of the sort that belongs to everyone and no one — like a national park’.

Every summer, though, the father comes to rest, and plan, and write, on a gale-swept Baltic island ‘in the long, narrow house surrounded by sea, stones, thistles, poppies, and barren moors’.