Spring

Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the third in his "seasons" tetralogy. Each is a letter to his daughter, who is in utereo, and then an infant, in the year the series covers. Spring, and the entire series, resists easy genre definitions. They're a blend of essay and memoir, leaning heavily on one in one installment, and abandoning that form in another. This one is mostly a long memoir that drifts around one horrifying event. The whole book hovers over the tragedy like a haze, and it's as gripping as it is uncomfortable. 

Knausgaard is probably my favorite active writer now. He's weird and banal and dour--and absolutely fantastic. I could read him write about anything. He usually does write about anything: making breakfast, finding a parking spot, arguing with his kids over TV time, mowing the lawn. Somehow, it's great. He's figured out how to describe the most tedious events with enough suspense and tension that later, after about twenty pages or so, you're in a completely different place. When the shattering event does happen in his work, you've been inhabiting his world for so long, in such a believable way, that it's all the more devastating.