He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent. Lauded in Scandinavia for its literary merit and moral poise, One of Us is the true story of one of our age's most tragic events.One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a NYT Bestseller, and now the basis for the Netflix film 22 July, from acclaimed filmmaker Paul Greengrass

One of Us is at once a psychological study of violent extremism, a dramatic true crime procedural, and a compassionate inquiry into how a privileged society copes with homegrown evil.

As Breivik took the stand and articulated his ideas, an entire country debated whether he should be deemed insane, and asked why a devastating sequence of police errors allowed one man to do so much harm. In the book's final act, Seierstad describes Breivik's tumultuous public trial. By the time Seierstad reaches Utøya and relates what happened there, we know both the killer and those he will kill. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik's victims, tracing their political awakenings, teenage flirtations and hopes, and ill-fated journeys to the island. She delves deep into Breivik's childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist, a successful entrepreneur, and then an Internet game addict and self-styled master warrior who believed he could save Europe from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young?Īs in her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress.

In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad's One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent.

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a New York Times bestseller, and now the basis for the Netflix film 22 July, from acclaimed filmmaker Paul Greengrass

One of Us by Åsne Seierstad