A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast

A celebrated Danish writer explores the unsung histories and geographies of her beloved slice of the world.

Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast--from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors' ties to the region as well as her decision to move there from Copenhagen. She writes about the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer's Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages that surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii starting in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, thirteenth-century church frescoes to her mother's unrealized dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks, and other instances of nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it.

Through a deep, personal engagement with this singular landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person's life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth.

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 11/01/2022
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.7lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.50w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781644452097


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/15/2022
Kirkus Reviews 09/15/2022
Library Journal 11/01/2022 pg. 120
Booklist 11/01/2022 pg. 21
Shelf Awareness 12/09/2022

About the Author
Dorthe Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop; four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize; and two novellas, collected in So Much for That Winter.