'Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters' RACHEL CUSK

He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea.

Now that she's grown up - a writer, with children of her own - and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record.

But it's winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words -- both remembered and recorded - remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book.

Heart-breaking and spell-binding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.