Gösta Berlings saga

A defrocked priest turned charming disaster tears through the Swedish countryside in the 1820s, carried by the force of Selma Lagerlöf’s storytelling and the wild beauty of the Värmland landscape. The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature announced herself with this exuberant debut.

Why Read This

Lagerlöf is the voice of Scandinavian literature that most readers outside the region have never heard, and she represents something the other two do not: joy. Where Hamsun is dark and Undset is solemn, Lagerlöf is exuberant, romantic, and deeply rooted in the oral storytelling tradition of the Swedish countryside.

Gösta Berlings saga reads like the sagas it draws on: episodic, larger than life, and driven by a hero who is both irresistible and impossible. Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this debut shows why: she could make the Swedish landscape speak, and what it said was myth.

What to Expect

An episodic, romantic novel set in early nineteenth-century Sweden. The prose is lyrical and the pace swift. The structure is closer to linked stories than a conventional plot. A window into Swedish culture that no other book provides.