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The debut non-fiction work from one of Denmark's most acclaimed writers, winner of the 2022 Blixen Prize and previously shortlisted for the International Booker Prize – featuring exquisite illustrations, including a map of the coastline
There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed writers, is a descendant of this line; for generations, her family lived beside the wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. Returning after decades of inhabiting cities, she chronicles a year spent travelling up and down the coast, tracing the history of the places she visits and untangling her relationship with the landscape she calls home.
This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who live in these wild places and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of shipwrecks and storm surges, of cold-water surfers and resolute sailors' wives. In spellbinding prose, Nors invites the reader on a journey through history and memory – the landscape as well as her own.
Dorthe Nors was born in 1970 and studied literature at the University of Aarhus. Her short stories have appeared in numerous international publications including the Boston Review, Harper's and the New Yorker. Nors's works include Wild Swims, Karate Chop, Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal – shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize – which are all published by Pushkin Press. Born in rural Jutland, she lives on the North Sea coast in Denmark.
– Shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize Shortlist 2023 for UK Nature Writing
"Magic [...] this is a wonderful holiday into a very fine writer's heart"
– Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us
"Starkly, achingly beautiful"
– Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest
"A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast"
– Katherine May, author of Wintering
"Dorthe Nors is one of those rare authors [...] who can bring a place to the page so that you forget the outside world while reading"
Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep
"A deep dive into a coastal landscape, both breathtaking and hypnotic"
– Natasha Carthew, author of Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience
"You need real nerve to gaze unfalteringly at the sea, and to walk untremblingly along the high creaking edges of the land, and life, and ideas. Nors is one of the very rare writers with that nerve [...] Taut, uncompromising, glittering"
– Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast and Being a Human
"Lyrical, luminescent, and yet rigorously concrete [...] I loved seeing this landscape through [Nors's] eyes"
– Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
"A strong, personal and moving portrait of a landscape [...] the light flowing though Nors's writing is breathtaking"
– Gunnhild Øyehaug, author of Present Tense Machine
"It's a joy to be in the hands of a writer as funny and playful with form as Dorthe Nors is, a writer who trusts her readers to be adults, to figure it out, to make the connections themselves"
– Lauren Groff, New York Review of Books
"Nors's writing creeps up on you and then overwhelms you with its emotional power. She is a master"
– Chris Kraus
"Dorthe Nors is fantastic!"
– Junot Díaz
