One of Us

Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller and the basis for the Netflix film 22 July: “A chilling descent into the mind of mass murderer Anders Breivik.” —Kirkus Reviews One of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2015 On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office in central Oslo, killing eight people. 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. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. 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? Delving deep into Breivik’s childhood, Seierstad shows 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. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik’s victims, tracing their political awakenings, teenage flirtations and hopes, and ill-fated journeys to the island. In the book’s final act, Seierstad describes Breivik’s tumultuous public trial. Lauded in Scandinavia for its literary merit and moral poise, 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.