Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Wolves of Eternity

By: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Martin Aitken - translator
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gilli Messer, Natasha Soudek, Vas Eli
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

The future is no more, and eternity has begun.

It's 1986 and a nuclear reactor has exploded in Chernobyl. Syvert Løyning returns home from military service to live with his mother and brother on the outskirts of a town in Southern Norway. One night, he dreams of his late father, and can't shake him from his mind. Searching through his father's belongings for clues and connections, he finds a cache of letters that lead to the Soviet Union.

In present-day Russia, Alevtina is trying to balance work and family. She has always sought the answers to life's big questions, but is preoccupied with care of her young son. Her friend Vasilisa offers some nourishment: she is writing a book about an ancient feature of Russian culture, the belief in eternal life. Meantime, Alevtina is heading towards a meeting that will redraw the contours of her world.

A searching and humane novel, The Wolves of Eternity is an intimate journey into the experiences of a half-brother and half-sister in their two different - yet deeply connected - lives. The second novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard's extraordinary new series, it expands the universe of The Morning Star in the decades before the blazing and mysterious star descends.

©2023 Karl Ove Knausgaard (P)2023 Penguin Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Morning Star cover art
A Bird in Winter cover art
The Man Without Qualities cover art
Just for Today cover art
Who Do You Love cover art
To Cut a Short Story Short, Vol. II cover art
Everyday Kindness cover art
Platform Seven cover art
The Creak on the Stairs cover art
Granta cover art
Remember Me cover art
One Summer cover art
How They Broke Britain cover art
Hero: A Simon Serrailler Short Story cover art

Critic reviews

I read The Morning Star compulsively, and stayed awake all night after finishing it. (Brandon Taylor)
[An] enormously compelling book… The range of subjects The Wolves of Eternity explores is fascinating

What listeners say about The Wolves of Eternity

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    6
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    8
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

beautiful.

just a beautiful piece of literature.
highly inspired by twentieth century Russian culture.
subtle and coarse at the same time.
I think I'll get another of his books.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

When it's good it's very, very good

Overall I'd strongly recommend this book. Certainly, readers who have enjoyed the "My Struggle" series, or who have enjoyed "The Morning Star", will also enjoy "The Wolves of Eternity".

The narrative in the voice of a young Norwegian, Syvert, which constitutes almost all of the first part of the novel, is fantastic. It builds slowly from a very simple beginning, with individual narrative strands added one at a time. I was completely gripped by it and was therefore pretty annoyed when it was suddenly interrupted (a real cliff-hanger) and the book was taken over by narrators in Russia.

The novel is eventually brought together in quite a traditional way when a much older Syvert visits Russia. But in the meantime there is quite a lot of discursive material about (mainly) death and the nature/varieties of mindedness and identity. This is basically all good stuff, which I will enjoy reading with more focus when I get the paper book. All the same, I feel a bit equivocal about its inclusion in the novel. There's nothing wrong in principle with (roughly speaking) pasting essays into a novel -- the novel form is almost infinitely capacious and I wouldn't want to say "this isn't a real novel" because of the discursive material. But a part of me would have preferred a shorter book, driven more exclusively by narrative.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Bonkers

Presumably KOK is inviting comparisons with those maddening Russian writers of the 19th century with huge swathes of completely insane spiritual psycho babble yet interspersed with a genuinely engaging story of common folk and their struggles. His style is so bad and full of cliche it must be studied and deliberate and it meshes the narrative into something interesting. I would love to know how his editors tackled him, but then we know he married her …

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!