Details (Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024)

Textured insights into human nature. ― The New Yorker

This beautiful, moving book unfolds in four stand-alone portraits that, together, yield a sharp, poignant picture of the portraitist. The narrative blurs the boundaries that separate memoir from fiction, past from present, and self from other, which evokes the spell of fever during which it was written. The miraculous sort of novel that fuses with our personal memories and becomes part of us -- Hernan Diaz, author of TRUST

The Details is about relationships, about love, about parents and children...about all of it. The little observations about being young, and about growing up, and about getting lost by accident, and getting lost on purpose, searching for yourself in everyone else...damn it, I've underlined half of the book. I wish I could write like this. -- Fredrik Backman, New York Times bestselling author of A MAN CALLED OVE

Brief and penetrating . . . Genberg's marvellous prose is also a kind of fever, mesmerizing and hot to the touch -- Catherine Lacey ― New York Times

The nonlinear narrative renders the protagonist both vivid and obscure - the perfect conduit for this compelling, uncannily precise meditation on transience. -- Hephzibah Anderson ― Observer

Emotionally nuanced and formally innovative, Ia Genberg's beautiful novel The Details manages the remarkable feat of painting a whole picture of a single life, solely via the lives of the people who have touched it. This is a novel that, through its very bones, encapsulates one of the most important ideas of our current political moment - the necessity of connection, and our vulnerability to one other. -- Susannah Dickey, author of TENNIS LESSONS

In four succinct and arresting portraits, the narrator of The Details remembers the people who have shaped her life. At once humorous and heartbreaking, this book is an ode to the different kinds of love that form us. It asks how we hold onto the people who touch us, how we remember them, and whether we should ever let them go. I won't forget this beautiful book. -- Jenna Clake, author of DISTURBANCE

It's difficult to describe the experience of reading Ia Genberg's English language debut beyond saying that it resembles a fever dream . . . Genberg's prose is a feat of characterization, a triumph of lending language and profundity to observations of daily life. At a tight 150 pages, I didn't read it so much as subconsciously absorb it. -- Eliza Smith ― Literary Hub