Kristin Lavransdatter is a complicated, dense novel that will surely cause your attention to flag here and there. By the time Kristin is gracefully approaching death, the book takes on a transcendent, almost religious quality - and even if you’re not a believer, the power of Kristin’s faith in God and her hope to feel his purpose in her life when he remains silent will still be moving. She focuses on the life Kristin carves out irrespective of them, a life involving a broken engagement, a scandalous love affair, and a slowly splintering relationship with her seven sons. Throughout her lifespan, major world events provide a backdrop of endless political intrigue, rises and falls from fortune and glory, and the arrival of the Black Death in Norway in 1349.īut Undset doesn’t focus on those major world events. She leads a mostly normal life, but like all of us, she lives in abnormal times. It follows the life of one medieval Norwegian woman named (you guessed it) Kristin Lavransdatter, from the age of 7 until she dies somewhere around the age of 50. You can purchase it as either one volume or as three separate ones.

Kristin Lavransdatter is over 1,000 pages long and was published in three parts between 1920 (one century old, baby!) and 1922. She wrote other highly acclaimed novels, but none have had the staying power (at least in the US and UK) of Kristin.

Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, who in 1928 became the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of those writers whose career has been largely defined by one book: her massive tome Kristin Lavransdatter. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend. One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature.