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Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century, Dina’s Book presents a beautiful, eccentric, and tempestuous heroine who carries a terrible burden: at the age of five she accidentally caused her mother’s death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. No one leads the child through her grief, and the accident remains a gruesome riddle of death, with Dina left haunted by the vindictive spirit of her mother. When her father agrees to take her back after several years, his efforts to cultivate her have little lasting effect. Tamed only by her tutor, who is able to reach her through music and draw out her gift for mathematics, Dina remains private and closely guarded, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power enchant and ensnare those around her. At age sixteen, she is married off to Jacob, a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, who later dies under odd circumstances. Wrestling with her two unappeased ghosts, Dina becomes mute and then emerges from her shock to run Jacob’s estate with an iron hand . . . until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.
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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 th...
Simply and beautifully written, this universal tale of a boy growing into manhood is told by an author who was also the firstborn and faced with the pressures of inheriting and expectations of working the family farm. Vesaas, however, takes this simple tale into new emotional and linguistic territory, as he poetically presents the experiences of Norwegian peasant life.
Volume 2.
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A powerful and absorbing mystery from the Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author of THE LEGACY. Bath, 1821. When Rachel Crofton marries, her new life soon takes a more unexpected turn as she is invited to become the companion to the reclusive Jonathan Alleyn, a man tormented by the disappearance of his childhood sweetheart, Alice. Starling, servant to the Alleyn family, is convinced that Alice, the woman she loved as a sister, was stolen from her. Did Alice run away? Or did something more sinister occur? As Rachel and Starling try to expose the lies, they find others are desperate to forget, and will go to extreme lengths to do so. . . This haunting historical fiction novel is perfect for fans of Sue Monk Kidd and Kristin Hannah. Your favourite authors love Katherine Webb's sweeping historical dramas: 'An enormously talented writer' Santa Montefiore 'Webb have a true gift for uncovering the mysteries of the human heart and exploring the truth of love' Kate Williams 'Katherine Webb's writing is beautiful' Elizabeth Fremantle 'A truly gifted writer of historical fiction' Lucinda Riley 'Katherine's writing is rich, vivid and evocative' Iona Grey
An agonizing turbulence lies just beneath the surface of this skillfully wrought novel by the French phenom who caused a sensation with the publication of her novel Incest. Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator out of this corrosive element, exposing an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter.