Norwegian Books

Key works of Norwegian literature – plot summaries, characters, themes and analysis.

Henrik Ibsen

A Doll’s House (1879)
The most performed of Ibsen’s plays. Nora Helmer’s break with marriage and society. The door that slams at the end became a cultural icon.

Hedda Gabler (1890)
Ibsen’s most purely psychological drama. Hedda Tesman: intelligent, trapped, and destructive by necessity.

Peer Gynt (1867)
A dramatic poem in five acts. Peer Gynt spends his whole life avoiding himself – and arrives too late at the discovery. With music by Edvard Grieg.

Ghosts (1881)
Banned across Europe on publication. About the past that holds the living captive, society’s double standards, and Mrs Alving’s impossible choice.

Knut Hamsun

Hunger (1890)
The modernist breakthrough. An unnamed narrator wanders Christiania, starving and refusing help. Twenty years ahead of Joyce and Woolf.

Pan (1894)
Lieutenant Glahn in the northern forests. A love story told by an unreliable narrator who systematically destroys what he most wants.

Growth of the Soil (1917)
The Nobel Prize novel. About the settler Isak and the value of work, land and rootedness against the advance of modernity.

Sigrid Undset

Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–1922)
A three-volume trilogy set in medieval Norway. Follows Kristin Lavransdatter from girlhood to death. Brought Undset the Nobel Prize.

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Synnøve Solbakken (1857)
Bjørnson’s literary breakthrough and a key work in the Norwegian peasant tale tradition. About Torbjørn and the work of becoming worthy of what he loves.