Tales of Two Countries

Norway and the continent in short stories: a rich man's charity, a fisherman's family, a Paris balloon, a peat bog. Kielland was born rich in Stavanger and spent his career attacking the class he came from — one of the four great Norwegians of the golden age alongside Ibsen, and the one who wrote the sharpest sentences. Fifty-eight plates of northern light by painters including Edvard Munch and Caspar David Friedrich carry the harbour views and mountain landscapes of these stories.