Let B 1 be the unit open ball with center at the origin in R N , N 2. We consider the following quasilinear problem depending on a real parameter λ > 0:where f (t) is a nonlinearity that grows like e t N/N −1 as t → ∞ and behaves like t α , for some α ∈ (−∞, 0), as t → 0 + . More precisely, we require f to satisfy assumptions (A1) and (A2) listed in Section 1. For such a general nonlinearity we show that if λ > 0 is small enough, (P λ ) admits at least one weak solution (in the sense of distributions). We further study the question of uniqueness and multiplicity of solutions to (P λ ) when Ω = B 1 under additional structural conditions on f (see assumptions (A3)-(A8) in Section 2). Using shooting methods and asymptotic analysis of ODEs, under the additional assumptions (A3)-(A5), we prove uniqueness of solution to (P λ ) for all λ > 0 small whereas under (A6), (A7) or (A8), we show multiplicity of solutions to (P λ ) for all λ > 0 in a maximal interval. These results clearly show that the borderline between uniqueness and multiplicity is given by the growth condition lim inf t→∞ h(t)te εt 1/(N −1) = ∞ ∀ε > 0.