Scandinavian Literature

First published in 1964, The Good Hope won the Nordic Prize for Literature. It is the first English translation of one of the greatest novels in the Danish language. The Good Hope is an epistolary novel based on the life of the Reverend Lucas Debes, a larger than life character called Peder Barresen in the novel. It tells a story of brutal oppression, poverty and terrible diseases, but also of resistance and of having the courage of one's convictions. It is a dramatic fantasy in which Heinesen's customary themes—the struggle against evil, sectarianism, superstition and oppression—emerge on a higher plane, set against the backcloth of the Faroe Islands in the 1690s.

The present generation of writers in the Faroe Islands have increasdingly in the last decade chosen to write in Faroese rather than Danish. Burgeoning political independence has stimulated a vigourous intellectual and artistic confidence. Gunnar Hoydal's long considered fictional journey through time and space is an excellent and timely example of this expansiveness. The Faroe Islands and South America combine in this tale of cultural and personal discovery. The children of a former UN worker revisit as adults theplaces and people they remember from travels with their father round a continent on the far side of the world. In Gunnar Hoydal's masterly hands, chronology and geography are indeterminate: the repressive politics of the twentieth century shift focus to reveal the arrival of the conquistadores; the stories told by children scratching for food in the shanties of La Paz find echoes in the folk tales of the Faroes. Hoydal looks unblinkingly at the politics of international aid, but finds hints of hope in the integration of old and new, of folk remedies and modern medicine, of the cold north and the warm south.

Jukka Viikilä’s Finlandia Prize winning novel is an extraordinarily beautiful journey into the landscape of a city and the mind of an architect.

Follows a Romanian beggar living on the streets of Helsinki. Vatanescu, a young Romanian construction worker, desires two things: a future for himself and a pair of football boots for his son. So off he goes to a cold, dark country to beg. Despite reading about Finland in the novels of Arto Paasilinna, Vatanescu has no idea what he is in for, and soon he is living on the streets of Helsinki, throwing feasts from the contents of a dumpster with his fellow beggars. Little does he realize, however, that his employer is about to ruin his bacchanal, and much, much more...As Vatanescu flees from international crime organizations as well as the Finnish police, he finds an unlikely companion: a hare who has been sentenced to death for living within Helsinki's city limits. Together, Vatanescu and his new fellow fugitive set on a journey from Lapland to the National Idea Park construction site, to the upper echelons of Finnish politics.

In the waning years of the Soviet Union, a sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she's trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment—No. 6.—but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed former soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colorful stories, recounting in lurid detail his sexual conquests and violent fights. There is a hint of menace in the air, but initially the woman is not so much scared of or shocked by him as she is repulsed. She stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn't cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he's brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her silent gloom. As their train cuts slowly across thousands of miles of a wintry Russia, where "everything is in motion, snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people and thoughts," a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of compartment No. 6. When they finally arrive in Ulan Bator, a series of starlit and sinister encounters bring Rosa Liksom's incantatory Compartment No. 6 to its powerful conclusion.

This is a translation of a classic Finnish novel from 1983 about a culturally diverse region in Finland, Ostrobothnia. The novel was made into a successful film by Pewkka Parikka in 1988.

About twenty years ago, the Finnish-Swedish family Bexar took readers by storm. The kites over Helsinki were Kjell Westö's definitive breakthrough and are today a modern classic. The young boy Henrik Bexar returns to Ostrobothnia after being a child of war in Sweden. The novel follows his children Dani, Marina and Riku from growing up in 1960s Helsinki into the confetti storm of the casino economy. In Kjell Westö's epic novel debut, there is the legendary Helsinki feeling that is also the foundation for his later writing.

First published in the United States in 1949 and widely condemned as obscene, The Egyptian outsold every other novel published that year, and remains a classic; readers worldwide have testified to its life-changing power. It is a full-bodied re-creation of a largely forgotten era in the world's history: the Egypt of the 14th century B.C.E., when pharaohs and gods contended with the near-collapse of history's greatest empire. This epic tale encompasses the whole of the then-known world, from Babylon to Crete, from Thebes to Jerusalem, while centering around one unforgettable figure: Sinuhe, a man of mysterious origins who rises from the depths of degradation to become personal physician to Pharaoh Akhnaton.

In Far och son, Jörn Donner weaves together the present and the past in an ingenious and surprising composition for a story that oscillates between deep seriousness and light-hearted comedy. The action of the novel takes place today, in the 50s and during the 20s and 30s in Helsinki, in Finland and in Central Europe... Jörn Donner shows here once again that he is a storyteller of sorts. Reading Far och son is like opening Chinese boxes, being faced time and again with a new yet unpredictable nuance. The novel is about passions, fulfilled and unfulfilled, and it is ambiguous in the same way as the reality that surrounds us (publisher's description, translated).

Originally published in 1951, this novel tells of a young girl living with her deeply religious grandparents in pre-war Vyborg—before it became part of the Soviet Union. Leena hates school, loves music and rain, and wanders through the town in a state of childish enchantment. 'Like a spruce cone, a child falls into a world where logical disorder replaces magical order, and there you are-in trouble, we'll agree'...The world she inhabits features multiple layers of reality, and this is reflected in the novel's artful narrative: life and death are reflections of each other, and reality is merely a map of the individual's inner world. Through the naive perspective of a young girl, the book addresses deep philosophical concerns in simple, lucid prose.

An elderly woman agrees to sell her life to a blocked writer she meets at a book fair. She needs to talk—her husband has not spoken since a family tragedy some months ago. She claims that her grown-up children are doing well, but the writer imagines less salubrious lives for them, as the downturn of Finland's economic boom begins to bite. Perhaps he's on to something. The Human Part is pure laugh-out-loud satire, laying bare the absurdities of modern society in the most vicious and precise manner imaginable.

"Anni and Sami, sister and brother. There was never any money. There was always alcohol. Life is still going well for Anni, with work, husband and children. For Sami, things go to hell. For long periods they have no contact, but Anni's longing to get her brother back is always there. Susanna Alakoski's story is filled with sadness and anger, over the power of drugs and society's exclusion mechanisms. But above all, this is also a love novel" (Goodreads description, translated).

Winner of the 1990 Finlandia Prize in Fiction. Jouko-Johan is divorced, the father of a 12-year-old daughter, a man who has been to strange corners of the world. Most recently, he has researched minority peoples in the border region between Iraq and Iran. However, the past is not forgotten, the worry about the daughter is heavy. What kind of outlook on life do her mother and stepfather, well-successful and socially adapted model citizens, offer the daughter. Jouko-Johan returns to Finland and kidnaps his daughter. A long odyssey across Europe begins. They have new names and fake passports and cannot be reached. But even though Jouko-Johan does his best, nothing goes according to his expectations. Isäksi ja tyttäreksi is a moving, multi-layered novel whose central themes are human responsibility, the effort to realize a dream, loneliness and the painful process of change. After that, only a new kind of connection between people is possible (publisher's description, translated).

"In the fall and winter of 1927, 20-year-old Helvi Hämäläinen worked on the manuscript of her first prose work. In her biography, she says that at that time she was a prisoner of an aesthetic worldview and that she wrote the work in a dark basement room, going through 'enchanted poetic experiences.' However, the finished mini-novel manuscript was too much for the publishing officials of the era, and the youthful work remained unpublished. Kaunis sielu is a story about a young woman who is erotically attached to her friend. The woman, on the other hand, feels disgusted with her boyfriend and plans to murder him. In a flowing and feverish text, Hämäläinen describes the main character's introspection, delusions, disgust and compulsive desire, which lead to a crime of passion." (Goodreads description, translated)

This is a collection of Juhani Aho's works, including his most popular stories: Panu, Kevät ja takatalvi, and Juha.

Christian Lang, a famous novelist and television show host, wants to keep secret his affair with the enchanting Sarita, but she has her own reasons for keeping quiet too. Lang finds himself caught up in a sinister love-triangle with Sarita and her psychotic ex-husband. He knows that his life is in danger, but so great is Lang’s passion for Sarita that he is unable to stay away. As he is drawn further into a web of lust, lies, and violence, his judgment becomes increasingly wayward. Lang —from one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed new noir writers—is a compelling story of obsession both physical and emotional; a tale about the power of passion to override every emotion, even fear.

"The book has fear, tension and dark humor. It tells the story of an engineer whose gangsters deliver the car under the ice in the back of the car" (Wikipedia, translated).

"In The Manila Rope, the main character deserts, taking with him a rope for which he is willing to risk his life, though he has no use for the rope. His journey home is interspersed with absurd stories from the war" (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Already an international sensation: a debut novel that tells a love story set in two countries in two radically different moments in time, bringing together a young man, his mother, a boa constrictor, and one capricious cat. In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably—he is terrified of snakes—he lets roam his apartment. But during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons, and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally, to open himself to true love—which he will find in the most unexpected place.

Natalia cannot stop thinking about sex. With this mesmerizing tale of one woman's potent affliction, award-winning Finnish writer Laura Lindstedt makes her American debut. Narrated by an unnamed, ungendered therapist who leaps at the chance to employ their most experimental methods, My Friend Natalia offers a gripping examination of the power dynamics always present but rarely ever spoken about in therapy. "Something flared within me," the therapist notes, "and it wasn't merely sympathy, the emotion I feel for most of my clients. It was more like a sudden experience of harmony, wholly inappropriate given the circumstances." It is clear from the moment Natalia barges into her new therapist's office that she has motives beyond simply fixing her sex life. She is quick to mention that the same exact painting hanging on the therapist's wall—an abstract piece titled Ear-Mouth--once hung in her grandmother's living room. This comment deeply unsettles the therapist, as does the large alarm clock that Natalia brings with her, intent on timing the sessions herself. And the tape recorder. At first, Natalia seems to play along with the rules of therapy. She partakes in the therapist's pain-displacement exercises, word games, and even produces a few anatomical illustrations. She muses on the art of pornography, and boldly examines seminal figures like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom she poses the question, "Did Jean-Paul consider Simone a woman at all? Or was she nothing but a pencil sharpener?" By combining philosophy and literature, repressed childhood memories and explicitly unrepressed erotic experiences, the sessions quickly shed all inhibitions. Still, the therapist can't help but wonder: What does Natalia really want?...

Myyrä is an amazing, skillful and touching novel about power and powerlessness, Finland and the Soviet Union, diplomatic cream and the misery of Siberian prison camps. Fathers and sons look at each other and past and women do not become extras. The reader's journey begins in 1918 and will end, if it ends, in 2004 (publisher's description, translated).

Performance artist Shlomith from New York, chief accountant Polina from Moscow, heart transplant patient Rosa Imaculada from Brazil, upper-crust Nina of Marseilles who is expecting twins, Wlbgis from the Netherlands, who suffers from throat cancer, Senegalese Maimuna, who dreams of a career as a model, and Austrian teenager Ulrike have all ended up in an empty, blank space. Time, as we understand it, has ceased to exist, and all bodily sensations seem to have disappeared. Playing with genres from essay to poetry, Oneiron is an astonishing work that explores the question of what follows death and delves deep into the lives and experiences of seven very different women.

Thanks to Rosa Liksom, post-punk writing is alive and well in Finland. Her vignettes on contemporary urban living have made her the representative writer of her generation. Her characters work play and drink hard and have little time to wallow in self-indulgence. Like the film maker Karusmaki, Rosa Liksom portrays a generation left high and dry by the post-war economic 'miracle.' No-hopers for whom paradise is drugs and cheap drink in Copenhagen.

An international sensation, Sofi Oksanen's award-winning novel Purge is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them. When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide's home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other's motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia's Soviet occupation. Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.

At first, the brothers are not a particularly peaceful lot and end up quarreling with the local constable, juryman, vicar, churchwarden, and teachers—not to mention their neighbours in the village of Toukola. No wonder young girls' mothers do not regard them as good suitors. When the brothers are required to learn to read before they can accept church confirmation and therefore official adulthood—and the right to marry—they decide to run away. Eventually they end up moving to distant Impivaara in the middle of relative wilderness, but their first efforts are shoddy—one Christmas Eve they end up burning down their sauna. The next spring they try again, but are forced to kill a nearby lord's herd of bulls and pay them back with wheat. Ten years of hard work clearing the forest for fields, hard drinking—and Simeoni s apocalyptic visions from delirium tremens—eventually lead them to mend their ways. They learn to read on their own and eventually return to Jukola. In the end, most of them become pillars of the community and family men. Still, the tone of the tale is not particularly moralistic.

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. "On an island," thinks the grandmother, "everything is complete." In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life. Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.

Joe Chayefski has got what he always wanted: a reputation as one of America's top neuroscientists, a beautiful wife and two perfect daughters. But his carefully created idyll is threatened when his Baltimore neuroscience lab is targeted by animal rights activists. The attack is followed by a phone call from Joe's ex-wife in Finland. Two decades have passed since he abandoned Alina and their young son, Samuel, returning to America to advance his career. Now Samuel is somewhere in the States, and Alina fears he is looking for revenge. As Joe struggles to protect his new family from the increasing threat of violence—and to save his eldest daughter from the clutches of an unscrupulous tech company—he is forced to reconsider his priorities and take drastic action to save those he loves.

WINNER OF THE 2016 EU PRIZE FOR LITERATURE. One quirk of fate can send life spiralling in the most unexpected direction... A young girl loses her mother when a block of ice falls from the sky. A woman wins the jackpot twice. A man is struck by lightning four times. Coincidence? Or something more? Things That Fall from the Sky is the tale of three lives that are changed forever by random events. But it is also a meditation on the endurance of love, the passage of time and the pain of loss. Selja Ahava, one of Finland's best-loved novelists, weaves these stories together in an unforgettable, one-of-a-kind fable about the twists and turns that can define a lifetime.

Translations of Kallas's trilogy: Barbara von Tisenhusen (1923), The Pastor of Reigi (1926), and The Wolf's Bride (1928).

Elsa is dying. Her husband, Martti, and daughter Eleonoora are struggling to accept the crushing thought that they are soon to lose her. As Elsa becomes ever more fragile, Eleonoora's childhood memories are slipping away. Meanwhile, Eleonoora's daughter Anna spends her time pondering the fates of passersby. For her the world is full of stories. But the story that will change her forever is the one about Eeva, her mother's nanny, whom her grandparents have been silent about for years. Eeva's forgotten story, which Anna first learns of when she discovers an old dress of Eeva's, is finally revealed layer by layer. The tale that unfolds is about a mother and daughter, about how memory can deceive us—and sometimes that is the most merciful thing that can happen.

Unknown Soldiers follows the fates of a ramshackle troupe of machine-gunners in the Second World War, as they argue, joke, swear, cadge a loaf of bread or a cigarette, combat both boredom and horror in the swamps and pine forests—and discover that war will make or break them. One of Finland's best-loved books, this gritty and unromantic depiction of battle honours the dogged determination of a country and the bonds of brotherhood forged between men at war, as they fight for their lives.

A tale of experience, past and present. In the ur-vind, or primordial attic, are stored not only relics from the story-teller's past, but also memories of those who inhabited the house where he was brought up. The ur-vind is also the cosmic wind, and the story-teller's name—Daniel Urwind.

"Antti Tuuri’s The Winter War is the novelist’s sincere tribute to the Finnish soldiers of the Winter War, the 105-day war following Russia’s invasion of Finland in November of 1939. Events are seen through the eyes of Martti Hakala, now an old man, who had been a rank-and-file soldier of the 23rd Infantry regiment, a unit drawn mainly from the province of Ostrobothnia. Like so many of his countrymen, Martti was called up to defend his country in this national emergency. The Winter War is based on authentic war diaries, interviews with veterans, and other first-hand sources. It is not, however, a documentary. It depicts the reactions of ordinary men to extraordinary circumstances, and what happens to these men when prolonged exposure to violent death and destruction creates an alternative reality, nightmarish and inescapable...Pekka Parikka’s celebrated film The Winter War (1989) was inspired by Tuuri’s novel. In fact, the first film made about this epic struggle, it was scripted by Antti Tuuri and Pekka Parikka, and produced by Marko Röhr" (Goodreads).

Thomas spends his summers at a cottage on the coast of Finland with his family and Rosa's family. Several summers pass before the idyll starts to tire and the women begin to desire other pastures.

A journalist and a photographer set out on an assignment, but as they drive along they hit a hare. The hare then adopts the journalist, and together the two scamper through farcical adventures and political scandal.

Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt's stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man's apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex—but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable "Blackcurrant," two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor's son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations.

About the meeting of two Greenlandic men after they have not seen each other since their youth. The guest asks the host to read some texts that he has written, with some not too optimistic considerations about the development seen from a Greenlandic perspective since the 1950s in terms of education, upbringing, cultural identity, traditions, religion and manners (publisher's description, translated).

The highly acclaimed debut from an author profiled by the New Yorker as her country's "unlikely literary star," Last Night in Nuuk follows the lives of five young Greenlanders exploring their identities at the cusp of adulthood. Niviaq Korneliussen is a ground-breaking young writer hailed for creating "[her] own genre" (Politiken, Denmark) in her witty and fearless debut Last Night in Nuuk. A work of daring invention about young life in Greenland, Korneliussen brilliantly weaves together the coming of age of five young people in the capital city, Nuuk. Fia has recently sworn off sausage (men) only to discover that the woman she wants is unavailable. Arnaq struggles to cope with her past as her hard-partying life spirals out of control and she betrays those she loves most. Inuk, Fia's brother, is forced to escape Greenland after political scandal implicates him, and confronts the true meaning of home. Meanwhile, Ivik and Sara must confront an important transition in their relationship. In a collection of blurry nights and bleary mornings after, Korneliussen creates a Greenlandic literature unlike any we have known before—young, urbane, stream-of-consciousness, studded with textspeak and delirious with nightlife. With vibrant imagery and daring prose, Korneliussen writes unforgettably about finding yourself and growing into the person you were meant to be. A stunning debut from a brave new voice, Last Night in Nuuk is a dashing entrance onto the literary scene and establishes her as a voice that cannot be ignored.

Published in 1915, Singnagtugaq: A Greenlanders Dream, created both furor and literary history as the first original novel in Greenlandic. Initially the book was seen as an encounter between the historic clash of good and evil-Danish colonizers and the colonized Greenlanders. The book portrays this encounter in vivid, harsh terms reflecting the time. At the end of the novel comes a vision of a future, modern Greenland, freed from colonial humiliation and poverty: the first literary expression of the desire for progress which later became so prominent in Greenlandic poetry and politics. It also described the first required Danish education for primary school students, not to serve as subservient to the Danish, but as a necessary part of a Greenlanders education and growth. Later, this apparent contradiction came to characterize Greenlandic cultural policy.

The Story of Katrine tells the story of a young Greenlandic woman who falls in love with a Danish craftsman, who works in Greenland over a summer. When he returns to Denmark, Katrine follows him because she thinks they should get married, having had their child. It will be a big disappointment for her, but she stays in Denmark. A dramatic and sad tale of cultural unity and oppression of women. This story, which is fictionalized here, is unfortunately not unknown for Greenlanders in Denmark.

Two brothers learn their father was murdered by their stepfather. Upon learning this, they both depart on journeys of self discovery leading them to the extremes of traditional Greenlandic culture and, finally, transcendence.

Hlynur Bjorn sleeps in. He surfs the Web. He tests the efficacy of various pornography. And at night, he hits the K-bar for a few drinks, maybe a tab of E, and perhaps a bit of sex before another crash. He'd blithely remain in this cycle forever, but when his part-time girlfriend reveals she's pregnant, his way of life is threatened. Hlynur withdraws and becomes obsessed with his mother's best friend, only to discover, after he's shagged her, that she's his mother's lesbian lover. And just when you believe he couldn't twist up his life any further, Hlynur finds a way...

In his dazzling literary debut in the English language, Olafur Johann Olafsson—one of Iceland's preeminent and best-selling writers of fiction—gives us the putative memoirs of an Icelandic expatriate living in New York in the autumn of his life, a degenerate, self-styled captain of industry and aesthete who has endured two failed marriages and whose children are "a testimony to a mistake." "Peter Peterson is a man racked by nightmares of a crime of passion he may have committed half a century ago out of unrequited love, a crime that has shaped the rest of his life. His memoirs—a confession ranging from his placid bourgeois boyhood in Reykjavik, to his days as a student in Nazi-occupied Denmark, to his ferocious rise as an immigrant entrepreneur in New York - are refracted not only through his paranoia, manipulativeness, vanity, crazed cynicism, and wry humor, but also through the sensibility of a compulsive fellow countryman who has translated and edited Peterson's scribblings in the settling of Peterson's estate—and who might have made them very much his own.

Born on the day Iceland joined NATO, this novel's unstable narrator worries this and other incidental phenomena into a highly complex, hilarious, and tragic cosmology. More interested in David Bowie and the Beatles than the Nordic sagas that shape the lives of the working-class peoples of Reykjavik, Paul retreats into his own fantastic, schizophrenic, painful world. His madness springs from bits of reality and brighter strikes of insanity. Out-of-work and aimless, tormented by bouts of drinking and ferocious tantrums, Paul walks Reykjavik's streets scaring his family lusting after women, recounting petty humiliations, and imagining the forces that both guide and haunt him.

The Great Edict (Stóridómur) was a puritan ethical code imposed by the Danish King on his Icelandic subjects in 1564, fourteen years after the Reformation. Prescribing harsh punishments for even the mildest extra-marital misdemeanour, it enabled the Danish King, and equally the Icelandic church and secular officials, to establish tyrannical rule over the farmers who eked out a living from their harsh land. Offenders were punished with brutal and humiliating sentences, the most fearsome of which was being deported for imprisonment in Copenhagen's notorious Blue Tower. In the seventeenth century the strictures of the Great Edict were ruthlessly enforced, and where the letter of the law did not suffice, witch hunts provided the authorities with whatever grounds they wanted. But ordinary Icelanders clung obstinately to their old ways, their ancient culture - and their instincts. Lore and learning were the only weapons that the poor but literate farmers had against their oppressors, the power of the word which was passed down in manuscripts, stories and poems from one generation to the next. Gudmundur Andrésson (c. 1615-1654) stands out against the age he lived in as both victem and victor: impoverished farmer, poet, scholar, offender against the Great Edict, and accidental escapee from the Blue Tower (title page verso).

Set in Reykjavík, this novel charts the changes that took place when the rural community clashed with the American popular culture brought by American troops. The story concerns two brothers, one of whom returns to "Devil's Island" with an American accent and large car, and becomes a local hero.

Shortly after World War I, Steinn, a young Icelandic poet-philosopher, heads abroad to make himself the most perfect man on earth and perceive glory on the visage of things. Leaving behind his homeland and would-be sweetheart, Diljá, for Europe, Steinn proves a master of any doctrine he cares to take up, but fails to satisfy his longing for perfection.

In a remote part of Iceland, a boy and his friend Bardur join a boat to fish for cod. A winter storm surprises them out at sea and Bardur who has forgotten his waterproof as he was too absorbed in "Paradise Lost", succumbs to the ferocious cold and dies. Appalled by the death and by the fishermen's callous ability to set about gutting the fatal catch, the boy leaves the village, intending to return the book to its owner. The extreme hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence to him - he has already resolved to join his friend in death. But once in the town he immerses himself in the stories and lives of its inhabitants, and decides that he cannot be with his friend just yet.

Winner of the 1995 Icelandic Literature Prize. Single mother Harpa has always been a misfit. Her physical appearance is unique among Icelanders: so small she self-deprecatingly refers to herself as a dwarf, so dark-skinned she doubts her genetic link to her father, so strange she nearly believed the children who mistook her for a mythical creature of the forest. Even as an adult, she struggles to make sense of her place in the world.So when she sees how her teenage daughter, Edda, has suffered since the death of her best friend, Harpa sees no choice but to tear her away from her dangerous social scene in the city. She enlists the help of a friend and loads her reprobate daughter and their belongings into a pickup truck, setting out on a road trip to Iceland’s bucolic eastern fjords.As they drive through the starkly beautiful landscape, winding around volcanic peaks, battling fierce windstorms, and forging ahead to a verdant valley, their personal vulnerabilities feel somehow less dangerous. The natural world, with all its contrasts, offers Harpa solace and the chance to reflect on her past in order to open her heart.

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize. Told with grace, insight, and humor, this is the story of one man's surprising mid-life adventure of self-discovery that leads him to find a new reason for being. Jónas Ebeneser is a handy DIY kind of man with a compulsion to fix things, but he can't seem to fix his own life. On the cusp of turning fifty, divorced, adrift, he's recently discovered he is not the biological father of his daughter, Gudrun Waterlily, and he has sunk into an existential crisis, losing all will to live. As he visits his senile mother in a nursing home, he secretly muses on how, when, and where to put himself out of his misery. To prevent his only daughter from discovering his body, Jónas decides it's best to die abroad. Armed with little more than his toolbox and a change of clothes, he flies to an unnamed country where the fumes of war still hover in the air. He books a room at the sparsely occupied Hotel Silence, in a small town riddled with landmines and the aftershocks of violence, and there he comes to understand the depths of other people's scars while beginning to see his wounds in a new light. A celebration of life's infinite possibilities, of transformations and second chances, Hotel Silence is a rousing story of a man, a community, and a path toward regeneration from the depths of despair.

Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.

Jokes for the Gunmen is an award-winning blast of literary brilliance from a major new voice in world literature.

Now available in English, this Nordic Prize winner for 1988 is a story of incest and infanticide set in the remote hinterlands of 19th-century Iceland.

A portrait of an artist trapped by convention and expectations but longing for the chaos that can set her free. Growing up on a farm in early twentieth-century rural Iceland, Karitas Jónsdóttir, one of six siblings, yearns for a new life. An artist, Karitas has a powerful calling and is determined to never let go of her true being, one unsuited for the conventional. But she is powerless against the fateful turns of real life and all its expectations of women. Pulled back time and again by design and by chance to the Icelandic countryside--as dutiful daughter, loving mother, and fisherman's wife—she struggles to thrive, to be what she was meant to be. Spanning decades and set against a breathtaking historical canvas, Karitas Untitled, an award-winning classic of Icelandic literature, is a complex and immersive portrait of an artist's conflict with love, family, nature, and a country unaccustomed to an untraditional woman—but most of all, with herself and the creative instincts she has no choice but to follow.

The mind-bending miniature historical epic is Sjón's specialty, and Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was is no exception. But it is also Sjón's most realistic, accessible, and heartfelt work yet. It is the story of a young man on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world—at what seems like history's most tumultuous, perhaps ultimate moment. Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores. And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there's nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats—and adventures—of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be all right. For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik's darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him.

A fresh translation of Nobel Prize-winning author Halldór Laxness's modernist masterpiece, Salka Valka. A feminist coming of age tale, an elegy to the plight of the working class and the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality, and a poetic window into the arrival of modernity in a tiny industrial town, Salka Valka is a novel of epic proportions, living and breathing with its expansive cast of characters, filled with tenderness, humor, and remarkable pathos. On a mid-winter night, an eleven-year-old Salvör and her unmarried mother Sigurlína disembark at the remote, run-down fishing village of Óseyri, where life is "lived in fish and consists of fish." The two women struggle to make their way amidst the domineering, salt-worn men of the town and their unsolicited attention, and, after Sigurlína's untimely death, Salvör pays for her funeral and walks home alone, precipitating her coming of age as a daring, strong-willed young woman who chops off her hair, earns her own wages, educates herself through political and philosophical texts, and, most significantly, becomes an advocate for the town's working class, ultimately organizing a local chapter of the seamen's union.

A nine-year old girl is sent to live and work on a country farm to serve her probation for shiplifting, a common form of punishment in Iceland. There, in a powerful, unchanging landscape, she experiences a community torn between ancient tradition and new attitudes. She confronts new and painful feelings and has to face the unknown within herself and her alien surroundings. The contrasts that Bergsson carefully develops throughout the novel, between the grotesque and the beautiful, the comical and the dramatic, come to a powerful conclusion in an almost surreal confrontation by a lake between the girl, the swan, and a lamb.

A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, Tómas Jónsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he’s going to write his own—a sure bestseller—that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, Tómas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir—something that’s as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published. Considered by many to be the “Icelandic Ulysses” for its wordplay, neologisms, structural upheaval, and reinvention of what’s possible in Icelandic writing, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller was a bestseller, heralding a new age of Icelandic literature.

As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation—the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet's life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness. As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.

Two sisters, Anna and Arnþrúdur, seek to understand themselves, each other, their lives and their relationships with their lovers—with Valgeir, semi-detached from his wife, and with Z, the journalist named for the flash of lightning that attended her birth. Approaching death casts issues of independence and commitment into sharp focus as the women's contemplation achieves a blistering and loving honesty.

After a grueling solo expedition on Vatnajökull Glacier, Austrian toponymist Bernhardt Fingerberg returns to civilization, barely alive, and into the care of Dr. Lassi. The doctor, suspicious of his story, attempts to discover his real motives for venturing into the treacherous wastelands of Iceland--but the secrets she unravels may be more dangerous than they're worth.

Cora Sandel was one of the most important Scandinavian writers of the 20th century and this is the second volume in her richly acclaimed Alberta trilogy. Alberta Selmer escapes from her cold suffocating provincial life in Norway to seek out the summer riches in Paris: a city where the bohemians will never die, where there is absinthe and endless talk of Cubism. But Paris is not all she imagined: although she begins to write small pieces for newspapers and periodicals, Alberta's self-esteem is low, and her inexperience makes her prey to the casual approaches of predatory men. Relationships, when they happen, are neither easy nor happy. Feeling her talent beginning to suffer and her freedom stagnating, Alberta faces a struggle to survive. After its publication in 1931, Alberta and Freedom established itself as an immediate classic and Alberta Selmer as one of the century's great anti-heroines.

Just before Christmas on a farm in Northern Norway, 80-year-old Anna Neshov, matriarch of a troubled family, is taken gravely ill. Her three sons have been quietly immersed in their work: one an undertaker, one a window-dresser, and the eldest running the family farm, but now they are forced to reunite for the first time in many years. Their personalities are as disparate as their careers, and tensions mount from the second they meet, climaxing over Christmas dinner when the matter of inheritance prompts the revelation of disturbing family secrets. Anne B. Ragde has created an engrossing dark comedy brought vividly to life through extraordinary characters. While perfectly in tune with their professions the Neshov sons as a family are little short of dysfunctional; nevertheless, the real theme of the novel is a sense of belonging. The farm itself defines this, with its power to draw people back to their roots, whether they like it or not.

From the internationally acclaimed author of Stella Descending and Grace, a captivating story of sisterhood and of the inescapable chords of childhood memory. Every summer Isak Lovenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarso. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none compares to Erika's bond with the rebellious misfit Ragnar, the intensity of which makes them inseparable. But when they reach the age of fourteen and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar's outcast state, she suddenly turns away—a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to forever alter Isak's family. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarso to see their father—now eighty, a bereaved widower, and in year-round exile there—the three women confront, finally, the specter of that awful summer, the mark of which each has since carried. Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost.

Eva and Simon have spent most of their adult lives together. Yet what binds them together isn't only affection and solidarity, but also the painful facts of their respective histories, which they keep hidden even from their own children. But after the abrupt dismissal of their housekeeper and Simon's increasing withdrawal into himself, the past can no longer be repressed. Lindstrøm has crafted a masterpiece about the grave mistakes people make when they misjudge the legacy of war, common prejudices and their own strategies of survival.

The third volume of Jan Kjærstad's trilogy finds Jonas aboard the Voyager, a small boat exploring the reaches of the great Sognefjord in western Norway...to discover finally the truth about his life, and what led to the death of his wife.

Lindemann has gone out to find Johanna, the girl he loved, and whom he now realizes he should have chosen when it was still possible. On the way, he meets Tomas i Dalen and the young girl Liv, who joins the trip. The three of them all have something they want to leave behind, and something they are looking for. But the journey turns out differently than they had thought, because the landscape becomes more and more dreamlike, and the whole time they have the feeling that someone is following them. The second story in Ei winterreise is a diary. He who writes has learned that he is ill, and with that the life he has comes out quite clearly. Everything that now becomes important he conveys in writing over the course of a year: the people around him, the music he listens to, the books he reads, conversations, thoughts and travels. This is how the diary becomes a "documentary" depiction of an illness story, a hospital stay. and a mental journey into the unknown. Along these two vegans, the novel unfolds. It is a story about small things and big questions, where those who travel no longer know what the questions are. But the answer may lie where the stories intersect (publisher's description, translated).

Both in the landscape and in the characters the wildness of nature is played out against the constraints of culture in this novel set in 1840's Norway.

In the tiny village of Mostad, squeezed between the roaring ocean and a saw-toothed mountain, the struggle against the element is eternal. In that small space births, weddings, and deaths unite families. The men who go down to the fishing boats do not always return. The women work and wish for better times while keeping the home fires burning. The people in these pages are almost too strikingly real to make fiction of, particularly Magda, who stays at Mostad for thirty-nine years and listens to its heartbeat grow dimmer as war, economic depression, and the effects of time and tide set in. For Love of Norway is a memorable modern Nordic saga, all the more impressive for an objective style that is the literary equivalent of photography.

When Johan was a boy, he bargained with Death, and in good time Death obligingly took his father. And when Johan was miserably married, Death kindly took his equine first wife, leaving him a tidy sum. But now, with the Reaper coming for him, Johan cries out for certainties, for control, for dignity. He enlists his adoring second wife, the grace of his otherwise mean existence, to be, "when he couldn't fight any longer," his reluctant angel of death. But as he drifts away into melancholic, hallucinatory recollection, the bonds of their mutual devotion gradually dissolve and the living and the dying begin their inevitable divergence. And as Johan, his wife beside him, slips under the solitary shadow he fears most, we are made to witness the muted tragedy of the Scandinavian way-now more and more our own way-of dying. Linn Ullmann has written a haunting meditation on mortality that nonetheless pulses with the aching beauty of life.

The Half Brother is a truly gripping, epic novel, hugely ambitious in scope and utterly compelling, a wonderful mixture of surreal comedy and touching intimacy. In stunning detail and elegant prose it relates the lives of four generations of a far-from-ordinary family. It opens on May 8, 1945, when 20-year-old Vera, hoping to celebrate with her mother and grandmother the end of World War II, is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that crime is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a boxer. Barnum, Vera's other son born several years later, and Fred form a bizarre but special relationship. 'I should have been your father,' Fred tells Barnum, 'instead of the fool who says he is.' Spanning 50 years, filled with a wonderful galaxy of finely etched characters, and structurally brilliant, The Half Brother has been both a literary sensation and a bestseller wherever it has been published.

Tells the story of Alma, a divorced textile artist, who rents out an apartment in her old villa to a Polish family. Will it be possible for her to reconcile her desire to be tolerant and altruistic with the imperative need for personal space?

Set in an isolated fishing village in northern Norway, this novel chronicles one year in the life of 11-year-old Tora. A tragic legacy of the German occupation, illegitimate Tora is a social outcast. Worse, Tora also has to cope with the fear of her brutish stepfather and his sexual assaults. She consoles herself with lonely fantasies about her real father, with books, and with the friendship and support of a few village women. This proletarian feminist novel is about the victimization of women, but also about women's solidarity and power. Awarded a coveted Nordic prize, this is the first volume of a trilogy.

First published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Contemptuous of novels of his time and what he saw as their stereotypical plots and empty characters, Knut Hamsun embarked on "an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body." Like the works of Dostoyevsky, it marks an extraordinary break with Western literary and humanistic traditions.

The book contains nine short stories. Almost all depict relationships between men and women, and women in particular are central to these texts. It is the conversation just below the surface, the games of meaning and the tense meaning in the seemingly completely everyday that characterize these texts (Den Norske Bokdatabasen).

In rural Norway, one evening after school, 11-year-old Siss and Unn strike up a deep and unusual bond. When the next day Unn sets off into the wintry woods in search of a mysterious frozen waterfall, known locally as the "ice palace," and does not return, a devastated Siss takes it upon herself to find her missing friend. The Ice Palace is one of the most memorable achievements in modern literature thanks in large part to Vesaas's unique command of a sparse, figurative and fragmentary style.

Jakob was Alexander Kielland's last novel, published in 1891. The book tells the story of the poor boy Tørres Snørtevold, who is searching up Jacob's Path to financial heaven. Driven by compassion, rage and realism, Alexander Lange Kielland (1849–1906) directed his revealing gaze at what he sees as authority and hypocrisy, oppression and injustice (publisher's description, translated).

In her great historical epic, Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally's award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty. As a young girl, Kristin is deeply devoted to her father, a kind and courageous man. But when as a student in a convent school she meets the charming and impetuous Erlend Nikulaussøn, she defies her parents in pursuit of her own desires. Her saga continues through her marriage to Erlend, their tumultuous life together raising seven sons as Erlend seeks to strengthen his political influence, and finally their estrangement as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty. With its captivating heroine and emotional potency, Kristin Lavransdatter is the masterwork of Norway's most beloved author-one of the twentieth century's most prodigious and engaged literary minds-and, in Nunnally's exquisite translation, a story that continues to enthrall.

A family of four—mother, father and two boys—move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.

Troubled by an inability to find any meaning in his life, the 25-year-old narrator of this deceptively simple novel quits university and eventually arrives at his brother's New York apartment. In a bid to discover what life is all about, he writes lists. He becomes obsessed by time and whether it actually matters. He faxes his meteorologist friend. He endlessly bounces a ball against the wall. He befriends a small boy who lives next door. He yearns to get to the bottom of life and how best to live it. Funny, friendly, enigmatic and frequently poignant—superbly naive.

After four years of living alone Bjørn Hansen contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life for ever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjørn carry his preposterous and dangerous plan through to its logical conclusion.

The initial volume in the Nobel Prize-winning author's tumultuous, epic story of medieval Norway—the first new English translation in nearly a century. As a child, Olav Audunssøn is given by his dying father to an old friend, Steinfinn Toressøn, who rashly promises to raise the boy as his foster son and eventually marry him to his own daughter, Ingunn. The two children, very different in temperament, become both brother and sister and betrothed. In the turbulent thirteenth-century Norway of Sigrid Undset's epic masterpiece, bloodlines and loyalties often supersede law, and the crown and the church vie for power and wealth. Against this background and the complicated relationship between Olav and Ingunn, a series of fateful decisions leads to murder, betrayal, exile, and disgrace. In Vows, the first book in the powerful Olav Audunssøn tetralogy, Undset presents a richly imagined world split between pagan codes of retribution and the constraints of Christian piety—all of which threaten to destroy the lives of two young people torn between desires of the heart and the dictates of family and fortune. As she did when writing her earlier and bestselling epic Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset immersed herself in the legal, religious, and historical documents of medieval Norway to create in Olav Audunssøn remarkably authentic and compelling portraits of Norwegian life in the Middle Ages. In this new English edition, renowned Scandinavian translator Tiina Nunnally again captures Undset's fluid prose, conveying in an engaging lyrical style the natural world, complex culture, and fraught emotional territory of Olav and Ingunn's dramatic story.

The second volume in the Nobel Prize-winning writer's epic of medieval Norway, finely capturing Undset's fluid, natural style in a new English translation, the first in nearly a century. As Norway moves into the fourteenth century, the kingdom continues to be racked by political turmoil and bloody family vendettas that serve as the backdrop for Sigrid Undset's masterful story about Olav Audunssøn and Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter. Betrothed as children and raised as foster siblings, their unbridled love for each other sets in motion a series of dire events—with a legacy of betrayal, murder, and disgrace that will echo for generations. In Providence, the second of Olav Audunssøn's four volumes, Olav settles in at his ancestral estate of Hestviken and soon brings Ingunn home as his wife. Both hope to put their troubles behind them as they start a new life together, but the crimes and shameful secrets of the past have a long reach and a tenacious hold. The consequences of sin, suspicion, and familial obligations may prove a greater threat to the pair's happiness than even their long years of separation. Set in a time when royalty and religion vie for power, and bloodlines and loyalties are effectively law, Providence summons a powerful picture of Northern life in the medieval era, as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding Undset the Nobel Prize. Conveying both the intimate drama of Olav and Ingunn's marriage and the epic sweep of their story, it is at once a moving and vivid recreation of a vanished world tainted by bloodshed and haunted by sin and retribution. As with her classic Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset immersed herself in legal, religious, and historical writings to create in Olav Audunssøn an astoundingly authentic and compelling portrait of Norwegian life in the Middle Ages. And as in her translation of Kristin Lavransdatter, Tiina Nunnally does full justice to Undset's fluid prose. Undset's writing style is by turns straightforward and delicately lyrical, conveying the natural world, the complex culture, and the fraught emotional territory against which Olav's story inexorably unfolds.

The third volume in the Nobel Prize-winning writer's epic story of medieval Norway, finely capturing Undset's fluid, natural style in the first English translation in nearly a century. In the early fourteenth century, Norway is a kingdom in political turmoil, struggling with opposing forces within its own borders and drawn into strife with neighboring Sweden and Denmark. Bloody family vendettas and conflicting loyalties sparked by the irrepressible passion of a boy and his foster sister (also his betrothed) have now set in motion a series of terrible consequences—with a legacy of betrayal, murder, and disgrace that will echo down through the generations. Crossroads, the third of Olav Audunssøn's four volumes, finds Olav heartbroken by loss and further estranged from his son. To escape his grief, Olav leaves his home estate of Hestviken and agrees to serve as captain on a small merchant ship headed to London. There, separated from everything familiar to him, Olav begins a visionary journey that will send him far into the forest and deep into his soul. Questioning past decisions and future plans, Olav must grapple with his own perceptions of love and guilt, sin and penitence, vengeance and forgiveness. Set in a time and place where royalty and religion vie for power, and bloodlines and loyalties are law, Crossroads summons a powerful picture of Northern life in medieval times, as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize in 1928. Conveying both the intimate drama and epic sweep of Olav's story as grief and guilt drive him to ever more desperate action, Crossroads is a moving and masterly re-creation of a vanished world tainted by bloodshed and haunted by sin and retribution. As with Kristin Lavransdatter, her earlier medieval epic, Undset immersed herself in the legal, religious, and historical documents of the time while writing Olav Audunssøn to create astoundingly authentic and compelling portraits of Norwegian life in the Middle Ages.

We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July. Trond's friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day—an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys. Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.

A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

The spirit of the 1890s found its most uniquely characteristic expression in the work of this poet. Generally accepted as having been the young 'Scandinavian in Paris' whom Rilke used as a model for the eponymous hero of Malte Laurids Brigge, Obstfelder was singularly attuned to the period in which he lived. This, his last and in its conception most ambitious work was cruelly cut short by his tragic death in 1900 at the age of thirty-three, and in its incomplete form was published posthumously. It is the diary of a priest, a man sustained by the conviction that within the chaotic immediacy of life, there lies a coherent ordering principle waiting to be discovered.

From the swarming streets of Copenhagen to the frozen villages of Greenland, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a grand, magisterial story of epic proportion. Earning rave reviews and scores of readers across the world, Kim Leine's masterpiece—sweeping across the sea in a whaler and scurrying, panicked, from the Great Fire of 1795—arrives on American shores erupting with pathos, lust, faith lost and found, and a cast of characters clinging to life amidst persecution and calamity.Idealistic, foolhardy Morten Falck, the hapless hero, is a newly ordained priest sailing to Greenland in 1787 to convert the Inuit to the Danish church. He's rejected the prospect of a sleepy posting in a local parish and instead departs for the forsaken Sukkertoppen colony, where he will endeavor to convert the locals. A town battered by unremittingly harsh winters and simmering with the threat of dissent, it is a far cry from the parish he envisioned; natives from neighboring villages have unified to reject colonial rule and establish their own settlement atop Eternal Fjord. A bumbling and at times terrifically destructive mix of Shakespeare's Falstaff and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale, he's woefully ill prepared to confront this new sect. Torn between his instinctive compassion for the rebel congregation perched atop Eternal Fjord and his duty to the church, Falck is forced to decide where he belongs. His exploits in this brutal backwater include an accidental explosion after a night curled around a keg, a botched surgery, a love affair with a solitary and fatalistic widow, and an apprenticeship with an eager young scholar that ends in tragedy. Based on authentic events in the 1780s and '90s, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord moves from the quiet rooms of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie to the stark, hardscrabble village of the Fjord where Falck finds himself—surprisingly—at home...

Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist—even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants is to share the books she loves with the citizens of Broken Wheel and to convince them that reading is one of the great joys of life. But she makes some unconventional choices that could force a lot of secrets into the open and change things for everyone in town. Reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, this is a warm, witty book about friendship, stories, and love.

Set at the end of the 19th century, this novel is a tale of mutiny and shipwreck. The narrator, Peder Jensen, is both competent second mate and unworldly philosopher. Esther Greenleaf Muerer has previously translated other works by Jens Bjorneboe, including Moment of Freedom.

Originally published in English in 1930, Sinners in Summertime takes a satirical look at sex, psychoanalysis, and the arrogance of youth. A group of students spend the summer along the Norwegian coast, determined to be honest about the nature of sex, in order to avoid the self-delusions they feel have plagued previous generations. What follows is a complete undermining of all their "enlightened" values, as they find themselves ensnared by romantic mischief. A novel of manners in an erawhen standards where about to break down, Sinners exposes the folly of youthful intellectualism, while also demonstrating the connections that bind all generations. Sigurd Hoel was one of the leading literary and cultural voices of Norway in the first half of the twentieth century.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Trilogy is Jon Fosse's critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav's Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love, for which Fosse received The Nordic Council's Prize for Literature in 2015.

Ingrid Barrøy is born on an island that bears her name—a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams. Her father dreams of building a quay that will connect them to the mainland, but closer ties to the wider world come at a price. Her mother has her own dreams—more children, a smaller island, a different life—and there is one question Ingrid must never ask her. Island life is hard, a living scratched from the dirt or trawled from the sea, so when Ingrid comes of age, she is sent to the mainland to work for one of the wealthy families on the coast. But Norway too is waking up to a wider world, a modern world that is capricious and can be cruel. Tragedy strikes, and Ingrid must fight to protect the home she thought she had left behind.

A reluctant centenarian much like Forrest Gump (if Gump were an explosives expert) decides it's not too late to start over...After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he's still in good health, and in one day, he turns 100. A big celebration is in the works, but Allan really isn't interested (and he'd like a bit more control over his vodka consumption). So he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey, involving, among other surprises, a suitcase stuffed with cash, some unpleasant criminals, a friendly hot-dog stand operator, and an elephant (not to mention a death by elephant). It would be the adventure of a lifetime for anyone else, but Allan has a larger-than-life backstory: Not only has he witnessed some of the most important events of the twentieth century, but he has actually played a key role in them. Starting out in munitions as a boy, he somehow finds himself involved in many of the key explosions of the twentieth century and travels the world, sharing meals and more with everyone from Stalin, Churchill, and Truman to Mao, Franco, and de Gaulle. Quirky and utterly unique, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared has charmed readers across the world.

As punishment for a scandal aboard a ship, a sixteenth-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, is abandoned on a small island north of Nova Scotia. Against all the odds she manages to survive. Centuries later, a writer sets out to rescue her story from the margins of history, but her search for ‘the Bear Woman’ forces her to contemplate much wider questions of fact and fiction, and her own writing process. This non-linear, genre-bending work is an introspective study of creation, motherhood, fiction and survival, and how women’s stories are told. Karolina Ramqvist’s precise, elegant prose offers an intimate insight into a working writer’s life (Swedish Institute).

Britt-Marie can't stand mess. She eats dinner at precisely the right time and starts her day at six in the morning because only lunatics wake up later than that. And she is not passive-aggressive. Not in the least. It's just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But at sixty-three, Britt-Marie has had enough. She finally walks out on her loveless forty-year marriage and finds a job in the only place she can: Borg, a small, derelict town devastated by the financial crisis. For the fastidious Britt-Marie, this new world of noisy children, muddy floors, and a roommate who is a rat (literally), is a hard adjustment. As for the citizens of Borg, with everything that they know crumbling around them, the only thing that they have left to hold onto is something Britt-Marie absolutely loathes: their love of soccer. When the village's youth team becomes desperate for a coach, they set their sights on her. She's the least likely candidate, but their need is obvious and there is no one else to do it. Thus begins a beautiful and unlikely partnership. In her new role as reluctant mentor to these lost young boys and girls, Britt-Marie soon finds herself becoming increasingly vital to the community. And even more surprisingly, she is the object of romantic desire for a friendly and handsome local policeman named Sven. In this world of oddballs and misfits, can Britt-Marie finally find a place where she belongs?

In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he has cancer and will not live through spring. Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper, is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. Westin has refused to surrender the time left him to the impersonation of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. "I took little walks and noticed that in the last months the pain had actually colored the landscape in a peculiar way. Here and there is a tree where it really hurt, here and there is a fence against whose post I struck my hand in passing." His inner landscape is also re-forming: "This constant concern with an indefinite dangerous secret in one’s own body, this feeling that some dramatic change is taking place, without one’s being able to have any clarity about what really is... reminds me of prepuberty. I even recognize this gentle feeling of shame again." The relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychic detachment, rendering his survival "a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high that no one exists who can practice it.” Yet he insists, "We begin again. We never give up."

Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister's beautiful wife complains of her husband's oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.

Pär Lagerkvist's richly philosophical novel The Dwarf is an exploration of individual and social identity. The novel, set in a time when Italian towns feuded over the outcome of the last feud, centers on a social outcast, the court dwarf PIccoline. From his special vantage point Piccoline comments on the court's prurience and on political intrigue as the town is gripped by a siege. Gradually, Piccoline is drawn deeper and deeper into the conflict, and he inspires fear and hate around him as he grows to represent the fascination of the masses with violence.

Considered one of Sweden's greatest 20th-century writers, Vilhelm Moberg created the characters Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson to portray the joys and tragedies of daily life for early Swedish immigrants in America. His consistently faithful depiction of these humble people's lives is a major strength of the Emigrant Novels. Moberg's extensive research in the papers of Swedish emigrants in archival collections enabled him to incorporate many details of pioneer life. First published between 1949 and 1959 in Swedish, these four books were considered a single work by Moberg, who intended that they be read as documentary novels. These reprint editions contain introductions written by Roger McKnight of Gustavus Adolphus College, and they restore Moberg's bibliography not included in earlier English editions. The first book in the series, The Emigrants introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their three young children, and eleven others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Småland in 1850. The other books in the series—Unto a Good Land (II), The Settlers (III), and The Last Letter Home (IV)—are also available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director. From one of Scandinavia's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it —and himself—indispensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz Ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience and asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?

In April 1988, Valerie Solanas—the writer, radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol—was discovered dead in her hotel room, in a grimy corner of San Francisco. She was only 52; alone, penniless and surrounded by the typed pages of her last writings. In The Faculty of Dreams, Sara Stridsberg revisits the hotel room where Solanas died, the courtroom where she was tried and convicted of attempting to murder Andy Warhol, the Georgia wastelands where she spent her childhood, and the mental hospitals where she was interned. Through imagined conversations and monologues, reminiscences and rantings, Stridsberg reconstructs this most intriguing and enigmatic of women, articulating the thoughts and fears that she struggled to express in life and giving a powerful, heartbreaking voice to the writer of the infamous SCUM Manifesto.

A grandfather who lives abroad returns home to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather is perfect—at least, according to himself. But over the course of ten intense days, relationships unfold and painful memories resurface. The grandfather is confronted by his past. The daughter is faced with an impossible choice. The son tries to write himself free. Something has to give. Per a longstanding family agreement, the grandfather has maintained his Swedish residency by coming to stay with his son every six months. Can this clause be renegotiated, or will it chain the family to its past forever? Through a series of quickly changing perspectives, in The Family Clause Jonas Hassen Khemiri evokes an intimate portrait of a chaotic and perfectly normal family, deeply wounded by the death of a child and the disappearance of a father.

The story takes place in the 1950s in the suburbs of Stockholm, in the university town of Lund, and in the United States. Neta's childhood is in disarray. She reads—words give form to the vagueness of existence—and is busy thinking about the female sex, family, and the stupendous diversity of people in the world. Her father, a mathematician, and her mother, a musician, are in constant conflict, but she loves them both. Gradually Neta realizes that she's grown up in a lie and that she must step carefully through the war zone of her parents' marriage.

Beaten up, bruised, and scared, a young writer hides in a Stockholm apartment, writing the story of its disappeared inhabitants: the flamboyant and charismatic Morgan brothers. It all began a year earlier, when he was rooming with Henry Morgan, a boxer, piano player, composer, bartender, and old-fashioned gentleman with a Gatsby-like capacity for turning life into a feast and absolutely no talent for keeping secrets. The two friends led the high-life in Stockholm until the day Henry's younger brother Leo a star poet, drunk, political provocateur showed up. Leo drags them into a scandal involving illegal weapons and gangsters, and soon the three men find themselves unwittingly and irreversibly trapped in a dangerous plot. Written with an intense regard for storytelling and style, Gentlemen is the most important literary work to emerge from Sweden in the past thirty years simultaneously celebrating and mourning the post-WWII era with its jazz music, poetry, hidden treasures, and espionage."

Lacemaker Lekholm Has an Idea, considered [the author's] masterpiece, is a family chronicle covering three generations of life in a provincial garrison town (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Originally published in Sweden in 1940, Land of Wooden Gods is the first volume of a trilogy of novels that Scandinavians consider among the greatest and most accurate every written about the Vikings. For capturing its directness and emotional force in English, Robert E. Bjork won the 1987 Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. A thrall named Holme is the protagonist of Land of Wooden Gods, which centers on the slave population of Sweden in the ninth century, when the country was on the verge of Christianization. The novel begins with the abandonment of a slave baby, condemned to the wolf-infested woods by a Viking chieftain upset by thrall unrest. The ensuing action shows Holme, the father, acting as not slave has ever before. Fridegård, a master at creating atmosphere, sets the scene for his monumental work: a Viking village, with its log halls, stable, and sty; feuding families and human sacrifice; broadsailed dragon ships; and a port of pirates. The remaining novels in the trilogy People of the Dawn (1944) and Sacrificial Smoke (1949) were published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1990.

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon; the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him 'the bitter neighbour from hell'. But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn't walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time? Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents' association to their very foundations.

While his mother is dying of tuberculosis and his father is away at sea, thirteen-year-old Ingemar is farmed out to relatives, pseudo-relatives and the children's home. His valiant attempts to manage life "in spite of it all" are both tragic and hilarious.

Eighteen-year-old Stella Sandell stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost fifteen years her senior. She is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. What reason could she have to know a shady businessman, let alone to kill him? Stella's father, a pastor, and mother, a criminal defense attorney, find their moral compasses tested as they defend their daughter, while struggling to understand why she is a suspect. Told in an unusual three-part structure, A Nearly Normal Family asks the questions: How well do you know your own children? How far would you go to protect them?

A powerful combination of ghost story and social realism.

Popular Music from Vittula tells the fantastical story of a young boy's unordinary existence, peopled by a visiting African priest, a witch in the heart of the forest, cousins from Missouri, an old Nazi, a beautiful girl with a black Volvo, silent men and tough women, a champion-bicyclist music teacher with a thumb in the middle of his hand—and, not least, on a shiny vinyl disk, the Beatles. The story unfolds in sweltering wood saunas, amidst chain thrashings and gang warfare, learning to play the guitar in the garage, over a traditional wedding meal, on the way to China, during drinking competitions, while learning secret languages, playing ice hockey surrounded by snow drifts, outsmarting mice, discovering girls, staging a first rock concert, peeing in the snow, skiing under a sparkling midnight sky. In the manner of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Mikael Niemi tells a story of a rural Sweden at once foreign and familiar, as a magical childhood slowly fades with the seasons into adult reality.

This novel combines the tale of the beautiful and androgynous Tintomara with the assassination of Gustave III on the stage of his own opera house at a masque ball in 1792.

Considered to be Sweden's first modern novel, it is full of humor and satire.

A novel that sympathetically examines the lives of tramps and other social outcasts (Goodreads).

Sent into the world by his master, a Cistercian monk and former Knight Templar, Arn Magnusson encounters the scheming power battles of twelfth-century Sweden and is separated from the woman he loves by a headstrong noble's fateful mistake.

Four autobiographical novels that were published together as Romanen om Olof. It follows a young man from Northern Sweden as he attempts to make his way in the world. Romanen om Olof was later adapted into the film Here Is Your Life.

The Royal Physician's Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee—court physician to mad young King Christian—stepped through an aperture in history and became the holder of absolute power in Denmark. His is a gripping tale of power, sex, love, and the life of the mind, and it is superbly rendered here by Sweden's most acclaimed writer. A charismatic German doctor and brilliant intellectual, Struensee used his influence to introduce hundreds of reforms in Denmark in the 1760s and had a tender and erotic affair with Queen Caroline Mathilde, who was unsatisfied by her unstable, childlike husband. And yet, his ambitions ultimately led to tragedy. This novel, perfect for book clubs, is a compelling look into the intrigues of an Enlightenment court and the life of a singular man.

In 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Saga of Gösta Berling is her first and best-loved novel—and the basis for the 1924 silent film of the same name that launched Greta Garbo into stardom. A defrocked minister, Gösta Berling finds a home at Ekeby, an ironworks estate that also houses and assortment of eccentric veterans of the Napoleanic Wars. His defiant and poetic spirit proves magnetic to a string of women, who fall under his spell in this sweeping historical epic set against the backdrop of the magnificent wintry beauty of rural Sweden.

In the Samuel series, which began with Samuels bok, Sven Delblanc took up his own family history to tell the story of his grandfather and his large family in freely written novel form. Among a multitude of destinies, three people stand at the center: the priest Samuel who is crushed and transformed into Tok-Sam, his daughter Maria who rises from humiliation and her dreamy son Axel. The novels take place in Oscarian Sweden, in Canada between the world wars and in the last part again in the Sörmland countryside, in Hedeby. There, the Delblanc reader meets many old acquaintances from the Hedeby series, and in this way two of the most beloved Swedish novel series are tied together into a whole, unique in our modern literature (Goodreads description, translated).

Sweden at the turn of the previous century. Arvid, an ambitious and well-educated young man, meets Lydia, the daughter of a landscape painter, during an idyllic summer vacation and falls in love. Lydia, however, has other suitors, and Astrid is frightened of being tied down by his emotions. Trapped inside loveless marriages of convenience, they struggle in later years to rekindle the promise of their romance with bitter and tragic results. Hjalmar Soderberg, born in Stockholm, in 1869, was one Scandinavia's leading modernist writers. The Serious Game is Sweden's most celebrated and enduring love story.

Summer with Monika is the classic unvarnished depiction of Swedish urban youth, its work and adjustment problems, its entertainment, its liberated erotic behavior, its way of being in all the shifts of life. The film adaptation of the book from 1953, directed by Ingmar Bergman, with Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson in the lead roles, received enormous attention and is today as classic as the novel. It is the story of Harry and Monika, who think they are escaping from society, but whose "escape" takes place within one summer. A summer that becomes a high show of love in the devotedly drawn Stockholm archipelago. The author tells about the young people's love-saturated lives in penetrating realism, but at the same time with finesse and compassion. Warm compassion and psychological insight also characterize his quick sketches of supporting characters, which together form a colorful and engaging gallery (publisher's description, translated).

This is the first book in Fogelstrom's five-volume Stockholm Series, which broke the record for bestsellers in his native Sweden. After reading the series in Swedish, Jennifer Brown Baverstam, an accomplished translator of Swedish and French, and married to a Swede, vowed to make these books available in English to share with her American family and friends. Per Anders Fogelstrom was delighted with this effort and worked with Jennifer until his death in 1998. This remarkable book tells the tale of Henning Nilsson and his family, a family whose origins and growth in the underclass of nineteenth-century Stockholm mirror the growth of Stockholm itself into a modern European metropolis. Beginning with the arrival in the city of the fifteen-year-old Henning, barefoot and penniless, on the eve of the industrial revolution, it continues with the story of his impassioned struggle for a fully human life. Powerfully written, City of My Dreams sweeps the reader along in a historical saga of fortune and love in a society experiencing great social and political upheaval.

There is Nils, the oldest, who couldn't escape his suffocating home soon enough, and Pierre, the youngest, easily bullied and quick to lash out. And then there is Benjamin, always the family's nerve center, perpetually on the lookout for triggers and trap doors in a volatile home where the children were left to fend for themselves, competing for their father's favor and their mother's elusive love. But as the years have unfolded, Benjamin has grown increasingly untethered from reality, frozen in place while life carries on around him. And among the brothers a dangerous current now vibrates. What really happened that summer day when everything was blown to pieces? In a thrillingly fast-paced narrative, The Survivors mixes the emotional acuity of Edward St. Aubyn, the literary verve of Ian McEwan, and the heart of Shuggie Bain. By brilliantly dissecting a mind unravelling in the wake of tragedy, Alex Schulman reveals the ways in which our deepest loyalties leave us open to the greatest betrayals.

The woman had come from a city in the south to lecture in a small village amid the snowbound forests of northern Sweden. She was a writer. After the lecture in the village hall an old man who had been sleeping at the back introduced himself, as she was to be his guest for the night. So it was that she moved in with Hadar, a man who lived on his own and was in the last stages of cancer. Not another house in sight, save for one just a field away; there lived Hadar's brother Olof, also on his own, and dying of heart disease. Neither brother would consent to die, the woman discovered, for that would give the satisfaction of outliving him.

In a small fishing village in Österlen in Scania, Julius Rhode grows up. His father is an agronomist and researcher and the family has a prominent position in the small community. At the age of three, Julius has an accident, for which he will only get the real, and cruel, explanation many years later. Then he also learns why Irma, his best friend and beloved, was locked up in a mental hospital at the age of fifteen, then the reason for the hideous tragedy in the rectory is revealed. And he decides to get revenge—revenge by telling the truth (publisher's description, translated).

W., the astonishing new novel by August Prize- winning author Steve Sem-Sandberg, is a literary reimagining of one of modern literature's touchstone texts, the play Woyzeck. Considered the first modern drama, Woyzeck tells the story of a loyal soldier and survivor of the Napoleonic Wars who, in a fit of jealous rage, kills the woman he loves. In 1836 this true story inspired Georg Buchner to write the play, unfinished at his death at just twenty-three years old. W. grippingly recounts the lovers' relationship, the murder case, and the soldier's execution. The story unfolds as the soldier W. struggles to recount the events of his life. He grasps at understanding and experiences feelings of time and timelessness. He finds patterns and repetitions, but these are of no interest to those determining his fate. Sem-Sandberg searched court archives to bring new light to this story, and he masterfully sustains a rich period atmosphere through poetic and controlled prose, down to the choice of pronouns as the soldier is held at a cold distance in court proceedings when addressed with the formal, capitalized "You." Against a landscape devastated by inhumanity and greed that, yet, manages to sustain hope, Steve Sem-Sandberg's W. tells a ruthless, moving, and utterly relevant story as the soldier W. desperately and humanly fights to make something of the life given to him.

Ellen has stopped talking. She thinks she may have killed her dad. Her brother's barricaded himself in his room. Their mother, a successful actress, carries on as normal. We're a family of light! she insists. But darkness seeps in everywhere and in their separate worlds each of them longs for togetherness.

Winner of the August Prize, Sweden's most prestigious literary award: a novel about a perfectly reasonable woman's descent into the delusions of unrequited love. Ester Nilsson is a sensible person in a sensible relationship. Until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself is in the audience, intrigued and clearly delighted by her fascination with him. When the two meet afterward, she is spellbound. Ester's life is then intrinsically linked to this meeting and the chain of events that unfolds. She leaves her boyfriend and throws herself into an imaginary relationship with Hugo. She falls deeply in love, and he consumes her thoughts. Indeed, in her own mind she's sure that she and Hugo are a couple. Slowly and painfully Ester comes to realize that her perception of the relationship is different from his. She's a woman who prides herself on having a rational and analytical mind, but in the face of her overpowering feelings for Hugo, she is too clever and too honest for her own good. Bitingly funny and darkly fascinating, Willful Disregard is a story about total and desperate devotion, and how willingly we betray ourselves in the pursuit of love.

The first of a tetralogy by the well-known Swedish author of Blackwater. Set in a Swedish village about to enter the modern age, the story begins in the 1870s, as an excited and suspicious citizenry await the first train to arrive at their newly cons

Maybe it was autumn, he doesn't remember for sure, but he had caught sight of her when she stepped out of the charcuterie. In her arms she had a piece of meat wrapped in a white package, in some places blood had stained the paper red. Xavier could not forget the pretty little woman he had caught a glimpse of. One evening he heads to the apartment building where she was seen darting in through the gate. With him he has a letter containing a declaration of love. Once inside the house, Xavier has to try his hand at opening door after door, he doesn't know her name. In one apartment he finds a young man about to take his own life, in another he meets a woman who sells her body for money. In yet another apartment, they think he is the doctor coming to deliver the pregnant woman who is struggling on a bed in the bedroom. Xavier is sucked into story after story in his search for the woman and behind every door hides a story. Mare Kandre's novel Xavier is like stepping into a landscape that is recognizable yet completely alien and above all unique (publisher's description, translated).

The collection, first one ever on Aino Kallas in English, highlights her significance to the artistic and intellectual horizons of modernity of Finland and Estonia as well as those of Scandinavia and Europe. In the 1920s and 30s, Aino Kallas became an internationally renowned author and a selection of her work was translated into English. For her, participating in the immediate cultural debates in Estonia and Finland was a priority, yet her whole oeuvre is a negotiation between her more immediate contexts and the leading conceptual frameworks of aesthetics, geniality, knowledge, subjectivity, race, sexuality, nature, etc., circling in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Containing articles focusing on the question of female voice and echoes of feminist ecological thought in her fiction, a contrapuntal reading of her fiction and that of Isak Dinesen, her unknown manuscript “Bathseba”, the implications of existentialist thought for her work, Kallas’ engagement in her cultural criticism and life writings with decadent modernism, issues of race and heredity, subjectivity and borders, travel, ageing, her interpretation of Goethe, and the iconography of Kallas, the collection features the work of today’s leading Aino Kallas scholars in Finland and in Estonia.

Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature analyses experiences of the Finnish capital in prose fiction published in Finnish in the period 1890–1940. It examines the relationships that are formed between Helsinki and fictional characters, focusing, especially, on the way in which urban public space is experienced. Particular attention is given to the description of movement through urban space. The primary material consists of a selection of more than sixty novels, collections of short stories and individual short stories. This study draws on two sets of theoretical frameworks: on the one hand, the expanding field of literary studies of the city, and on the other hand, concepts provided by humanistic and critical geography, as well as by urban studies. This study is the first monograph to examine Helsinki in literature written in Finnish. It shows that rich descriptions of urban life have formed an integral part of Finnish literature from the late nineteenth century onward. Around the turn of the twentieth century, literary Helsinki was approached from a variety of generic and thematic perspectives which were in close dialogue with international contemporary traditions and age-old images of the city, and defined by events typical of Helsinki's own history. Helsinki literature of the 1920s and 1930s further developed the defining traits that took form around the turn of the century, adding a number of new thematic and stylistic nuances. The city experience was increasingly aestheticized and internalized. As the centre of the city became less prominent in literature, the margins of the city and specific socially defined neighbourhoods gained in importance. Many of the central characteristics of how Helsinki is experienced in the literature published during this period remain part of the ongoing discourse on literary Helsinki: Helsinki as a city of leisure and light, inviting dreamy wanderings; the experience of a city divided along the fault lines of gender, class and language; the city as a disorientating and paralyzing cesspit of vice; the city as an imago mundi, symbolic of the body politic; the city of everyday and often very mundane experiences, and the city that invites a profound sense of attachment—an environment onto which characters project their innermost sentiments.

The literature of Finland is bilingual, with lively and extensive traditions in both Finnish and Swedish. This history covers both literary traditions in detail. The volume's first section, on Finnish-language literature, consists of a series of connected chapters by leading authorities within the field. It opens with a consideration of the folk literature in Finnish that flourished during the Middle Ages and then examines the more recent history of Finnish-language literature, with special emphasis placed on writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second part of the book provides an examination of Finland's Swedish-language literature from the late fifteenth century through the early nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters trace developments in Finland's Swedish-language literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A survey of children's literature--from both the Finnish- and Swedish-language traditions--concludes this exceptionally thorough volume.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

In the Land of the North Star Yrjo Varpio gives an introduction to Finnish Culture and Finnish thinking and examines the role that Finland's neighbors-western, eastern, and southern- have played in shaping Finnish culture and thought. In this book, the central role is given to writers, to literature and to language, and to their role in shaping Finnish cultural and national identity. In addition to the many short extracts from Finnish literature given in the main text, there is a brief overview of Finnish history "In a nutshell" at the back of the book, and a comprehensive bibliography is given of Finnish literature available in English translation. This book is incredibly difficult to find online, but may be of great use to students studying literature, or perhaps the cultural history of Finland.

In international research, metafictionality and other metaliterary features have typically been regarded as phenomena related to postmodernist fiction, in particular—Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature, however, discusses the metalayers of Finnish literature from the early 20th century to the present. By analyzing different genres of Finnish literature in varying historical contexts Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature provides an abundance of new information on Finnish literature and its metaliterary phenomena for everyone interested. In the articles of this book, the metalayers of literature are discussed in experimental prose and poetry as well as in popular fiction and children’s literature.

This book examines phenomena from Finnish and Finnish-Swedish literature written in the years between the 1980s and the first decade of the new millennium. Its objective is to study this interesting era of literary history in Finland and to sketch some possible directions for future development by identifying literary turning points which have already occurred.

Finnish women writers from the nineteenth century onwards have dealt with various problems concerning women's daily lives, their rights, their identities and their own voice. And these same questions can still be heard in contemporary women's literature. The articles in Women's Voices survey some of the ways in which Finnish female authors from the 1840s to the 1990s have dealt with these questions, and the solutions to these problems they have envisioned in their writing. How has the idea of freedom changed? What has been the relationship between female authors and the women's movement? What happens when female authors gradually become aware of the multiplicity of their identity? How do different literary genres affect the way women write? These are some of the questions focused on in Women's Voices. At the same time the volume presents an overview of the range of approaches to feminist criticism drawn on by Finnish feminist scholars.

Halldór Laxness is a study of Iceland's Nobel prize-winning novelist and his works.

A History of Icelandic Literature provides a complete overview of the literature of Iceland, from the country's settlement in the ninth century until the present day, including chapters on lesser-known areas such as drama, children's literature, women's literature, and North American Icelandic literature. It is the first work to give non-Icelandic readers a wide-ranging introduction to Iceland's literature and each contributor to this volume is a recognized expert in his or her area. Despite its peripheral geographical position and small population, Iceland produced some of the most remarkable literary treasures of the Middle Ages, particularly sagas and Eddic poetry. These medieval works have inspired poets and writers across the centuries, who in turn have inspired the Icelandic people during the country's long history of hardships and up to its more affluent present. This volume extends knowledge of Icelandic literature outside the country and encourages its inclusion in comparative studies of literatures across national and linguistic boundaries.

This book includes biographies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and novelists, and considers how modern Icelandic literature fits into an historical context through its Icelandic origins, Old Icelandic literature, developments in modern world literature and social and political conditions in Iceland (Gale).

As the global banking boom of the early twenty-first century expanded towards implosion, Icelandic media began calling the country’s celebrity financiers útrásarvíkingar: “raiding vikings.” This new coinage encapsulated the macho, medievalist nationalism which underwrote Iceland’s exponential financialisation. Yet within a few days in October 2008, Iceland saw all its main banks collapse beneath debts worth nearly ten times the country’s GDP. Hall charts how Icelandic novelists and poets grappled with the Crash over the ensuing decade. As the first English-language monograph devoted to twenty-first-century Icelandic literature, it provides Anglophone readers with an introduction to one of the world’s liveliest literary scenes. It also contributes a key case study for understanding global artistic responses to the early twenty-first century crisis of runaway, unregulated capitalism, exploring the struggles of writers to adapt realist forms of art to surreal times. As Iceland’s biggest crisis since their independence from Denmark in 1944, the effect of the Crash on the national self-image was as seismic as its effects on the economy. This study analyses the centrality of whiteness and the abjection of the “developing world” in Iceland’s post-colonial identity, and shows how Crash-writing explores the collisions of Iceland’s traditional, nationalist medievalism with a dystopian, Orientalist medievalism associated with the Islamic world. The Crash in Iceland was instantly recognised as offering important economic insights. This book shows how Iceland also helps us to understand the cultural convulsions that have followed the Financial Crisis widely in the West.

This book examines the significance of cabins and other temporary seasonal dwellings as important symbols in modern Norwegian cultural and literary history. The author uses Michel Foucault's notion of the "heterotopia"—an actual place that also functions imaginatively as a kind of real-world utopia—to examine how cabins have signified differently during successive periods, from an Enlightenment trope of simplicity and moderation, through the rise of tourism, into a period of increasing individualism and alienation from nature. For each period discussed, the author relates a widely recognized real world cabin to a cluster of thematically related literary texts from a wide variety of genres. Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature considers both central canonical works, such as Camilla Collett's The District Governor's Daughters, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's Synnøve Solbakken, Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, and Knut Hamsun's The Growth of the Soil, as well as less widely known literary works and texts from marginal genres such as hunting narratives and crime fiction. In addition, the book contains analyses of a few key films from the contemporary period that also activate the cabin as a motif. The central argument is that while Norwegians today tend to think of cabin culture as essentially unchanging over a long span of time, it has in fact changed dramatically over the past two hundred years, and that it is an extremely rich and complex cultural phenomenon deeply imbedded in the construction of national identity.

Der litteratur blir til: nedslag i norsk litteraturhistorie etter 1814 deals with fifty selected authors where the place is a main perspective. The text takes you to Lom and Lillehammer, Romsdal and Røros, Kongsberg and Kristiania—and ranges from Henrik Wergeland and Maurits Hansen to Laila Stien and Thure Erik Lund. The production tries to show how city and landscape are also important for understanding fiction. Chronological thinking has been muted, and the same applies to periods. The historical connection emerges through introductions that tell about general historical trends...(publisher's description, translated)

A collection of articles edited by Hans H. Skei. This collection of articles on Kielland's authorship includes a couple of older and rather unknown assessments of the authorship, one from the USA in 1891 by Hjalmar Hj. Boyesen, the second by Johannes Thrap-Meyer from 1929. Otherwise there are contributions from Owe Apeland, Liv Bliksrud, Jan Inge Sørbø, Per Thomas Andersen, Elin Husebø, Åsfrid Hegdal, Georg Johannesen, Hans H. Skei and Anne-Lisa Amadou. Kielland's short story "En Debat" from Dagbladet in 1878 appears here in book form for the first time, and a previously unknown letter from 1876 is also included. At the back there is a bibliography of what has been written about Kielland in books and journals after 1945 (publisher's description, translated).

Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway illuminates the connections between literature and politics in interwar Europe. Focusing on the works of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun and modernist poets Asmund Sveen and Rolf Jacobsen, all of whom collaborated with the Nazi regime during the occupation of Norway in World War II, and those of the anti-fascist novelist and critic Sigurd Hoel, Dean Krouk reveals key aspects of the modernist literary imagination in Norway. In their writings, Hamsun, Sveen, and Jacobsen expressed their discontent with twentieth-century European modernity, which they perceived as overly rationalized or nihilistic. Krouk explains how fascism offered these writers a seductive utopian vision that intersected with the countercultural and avant-garde aspects of their literary works, while Hoel's critical analysis of Nazism extended to a questioning of all patriarchal forms of authority. Krouk's readings of their works serve as a timely reminder to us all of the dangers of fascism.

Long under the cultural domination of Denmark and the political hegemony of Sweden, Norway first defined itself through its literature and continues to do so to our day. A History of Norwegian Literature reviews the complex role literature has played in Norway since runic times. Beginning with rock carvings five millennia old, Norwegian literature first came to flower with the Norse poets of the ninth century, who chronicled the heroism of Viking explorers and conquerers. The authors describe the subsequent progression of Norwegian literature through the middle ages and the baroque to Ludvig Holberg and the age of enlightenment, and from thence to the cultural debates of the nineteenth century, the dramas of Ibsen, the psychological novels of Sigurd Hoel, the modernist poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, and the postmodernism of the present. The works of Nobel Prize winners Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, and Bjornstjerne Bjornson are covered in some detail, and separate chapters are devoted to children's literature and women writers in Norwegian literature. Like other volumes in A History of Scandinavian Literatures; A History of Norwegian Literature views the literature of Norway not only as part of an interrelated Scandinavian tradition but as part of world literature. A comparative approach is used throughout, and social and cultural history feature prominently. Contributors to Volume 2 include leading scholars James E. Knirk, Kathleen Stokker, Harald Naess, James McFarlane, William Mishler, Jan I. Sjåvik, Margaret O'Leary, and Faith Ingwersen.

US

Volume One in a new series, this book covers Norwegian women's writing over the last 150 years, setting literary developments against the background of the emergence and growth of the women's movement in Norway. The work is divided chronologically into three sections: the period up to 1913, when the universal suffrage was granted; the period from 1913 to 1960, a time of stagnation in the women's movement, with little involvement in contemporary political, social and economic debates; and the period from 1960 to the present day, which has seen an increasing participation of women in public life. Chapters on individual authors concentrate on the images of the women portrayed and investigate the conflicts behind the text - the tensions between the authors and their work, and the ambivalent feelings of women authors towards the act of writing. The book should be of interest to all those concerned with women's writing and with Scandanavian literature and culture.

Brilliant. The work of Scobbie and company deserves wide distribution (World Literature Today). This is the best single volume history of modern Swedish literature available and this new edition makes it even better. With over one hundred pages of new material, the survey is now brought up to date with assessments of the poetry and prose of the last decade. Beginning in the 1880s, the book includes both in-depth studies of major writers, like August Strindberg, Hjalmar Soderberg, and Par Lagerkvist, and survey accounts of the more important periods and movements, from the neo-romantic writers of the 1890s to the uniquely important working-class literature of the 1930s, and the modernist lyric poetry of the following decade. Information about other useful works in the field are included, as well as an extensive bibliography of English translations.

This volume traces Swedish literature from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to its honored place in world literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A comprehensive reference work, A History of Swedish Literature provides much more than names and dates. Sweden's relative isolation in a remote corner of Europe put special stress on its language and literature to define national identity. In this volume nine scholars from Europe and America identify what is particular about Swedish literary culture as well as what makes it an integral part of European literature. The volume views Swedish literature in its historical and social context and reflects on the concerns of each age. Although women authors are treated throughout the book, a chapter on women's literature provides a salutary view of the gender issue in Swedish literature and the development of a feminist awareness. An additional chapter discusses children's literature, a major Swedish cultural export.

The book is a comparative study of the works of Józef Wittlin and Pär Lagerkvist, in their youth recognized as prominent expressionist writers, and in their later years making the ethical topic the core of their works. In search for ways of expressing ethical dilemmas, the works of Søren Kierkegaard and his concept of indirect communication turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful tool for both writers, enabling them to explore the matters of ethics and morals in a way substantially different from traditional didactic literature. In the reading of Wittlin's and Lagerkvist's works undertaken in this book, the perspectives of comparative studies and the history of literature complement and make it possible to describe an important, but rarely recognized phenomenon of modern European literature: its ethical variant.

Here, Björklund shows that Swedish literary discourses on lesbianism provocatively contrast with a widely accepted view that attitudes toward homosexuality have gradually become more tolerant. The lasting power of negative discourses upends the assumption that Sweden's progressive laws reflect progressive attitudes toward homosexuality.

This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.

These excerpts from Swedish prose works—mostly novels—reflect major shifts in mood and style in the 25 years since 1950. Editor Karl Erik Lagerlof traces cultural and political developments in Sweden from the post-World War II era, when writers felt themselves in a world devoid of political meaning and rejected realism as a literary mode, down to the intensely political years of the Vietnam era. The selections in this anthology range from the anti-ideological works of the postwar years to recent documentary methods influenced by Marxism, structuralism, and a renewed political consciousness.

Literary descriptions of shifting from and transgressing assigned sex were common in 19th-century Sweden. This thesis forms a contribution to the larger project of writing a history of Swedish trans literature, and develops new interpretations of certain works of fiction by applying a transgender studies perspective. Through trans readings the thesis also examines what potential and possible implications literature might have for trans people beyond the literary realm. Trans readings are able to supplement earlier research by providing a nuanced understanding of the production of trans- and cisgenders. The theoretical perspectives used in the thesis are drawn for the most part from queer and transgender studies. The thesis adopts a conceptual understanding of trans as a movement, and aims to widen the scope of what may be considered relevant to a history of trans literature...

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