A Time for Everything | Granta

  • Published: 07/05/2015
  • ISBN: 9781846275920
  • Granta Books
  • 528 pages

A Time for Everything

Karl Ove Knausgaard

What if God exists? What if angels are real? What if we treated religious tracts, including the Bible, as empirical evidence of the supernatural world?

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s major novel, A Time For Everything, is about God and his angels. It posits that angels are real, and that God exists. It posits, further, that heavenly beings evolve, and that even God may be subject to change. Written with Knausgaard’s characteristic style – level, patient, and intensely readable – it is a dazzling and innovative examination of the relationships between human, angels and God.

Knausgaard’s novel A Time For Everything was originally published by Portobello as A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. The book is now restored to its original structure in a new edition which is faithful to the original text

A vast, intriguing novel... The power it carries is perplexing... Brave and at times bizarrely beautiful

Niall Griffiths, Telegraph

This theological fantasy is a heavenly delight. We see life among those early people from Genesis: tilling the soil, building houses and preparing sacrifices to God, always aware of the glow of the Cherubim guarding Eden, over the mountains. But wait: they have stoves, and button-fly trousers, and guns. Not just strange, this is a quite extraordinary novel, and completely original

Independent

This strange and serious novel of ideas is an admirably imaginative contemporary reinterpretation of characters whose odd, splendid appearances in Christian mythology are made all the more mysterious for being matter-of-fact and never fully explained

Tina Jackson, Metro

The Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968 and made his debut with Out of This World. This, his second novel, won the P2 Listener’s Novel Prize and Sorlandets Literature Prize and was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize. Translation rights have sold widely in Europe.

More about the author →

Karl Ove Knausgaard on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

A Time for Everything

Karl Ove Knausgaard

‘It can almost seem as if God was genuinely concerned about mankind.’ Translated by James Anderson.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

Karl Ove Knausgaard | The Proust Questionnaire

Karl Ove Knausgaard

'What is your most unappealing habit? Maybe all the brain-like chewing gums I leave behind everywhere I work.'