A review by iancarpenter
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad

4.0

Immense, incredible, heartbreaking, shocking, frightening - it's only 500+ pages but this book feels vast and impossibly thorough. Seierstad's weaving of the lives of many survivors and victims of Breivik's is brilliant and the only way to thoroughly write about this event but for me it was too much. I eventually cherry picked through those stories because for me they were extremely detailed and weren't the mystery of it all. And even if you do that the victims and survivors are still present, everywhere - the painful, heartbreaking fallout of Breivik's misdirected anger, hurt and self-obsession.

I'm really glad I read this right now at the height of BLM, Brexit, Trump, Munich murders, Turkey and the Syrian refugee crisis because it feels deeply relevant to all of it. An amazing piece of work.