The Greenlanders - Hardcover

Smiley, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394551206 ISBN 13: 9780394551203

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas.

Set in the fourteenth century in Europe’s most farflung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains, The Greenlanders is the story of one family–proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book. Jane Smiley takes us into this world of farmers, priests, and lawspeakers, of hunts and feasts and long-standing feuds, and by an act of literary magic, makes a remote time, place, and people not only real but dear to us.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"HAUNTING."
--The New York Times Book Review
Jane Smiley, the Pultizer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, gives us a magnificent novel of fourteenth-century Greenland. Rich with fascinating detail about the day-to-day joys and innumerable hardships of remarkable people, The Greenlanders is also the compelling story of one family--proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book. Echoing the simple power of the old Norse sagas, here is a novel that brings a remote civilization to life and shows how it was very like our own.
"TOTALLY COMPELLING . . . FASCINATING . . . In the manner of the big books of the nineteenth century, in which complex family and community matters unravel--Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy--The Greenlanders sweeps the reader along. . . . Jane Smiley is a true storyteller."
--The Washington Post
"A POWERFUL, MOVING STUDY OF HUMAN FRAILTY AND THE EPHEMERAL NATURE OF COURAGE AND LOVE."
--USA Today
"WONDERFUL . . . A HISTORICAL NOVEL WITH THE NEARNESS OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION."
--The New Republic
"[AN] EPIC MASTERPIECE . . . SPELLBINDING."
--Newsday

About the Author:

Jane Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of A Thousand Acres and more than ten other works of fiction, including Good Faith, Horse Heaven, and Moo, as well as a critically acclaimed biography of Charles Dickens. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in northern California.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0394551206
• ISBN 13: 9780394551203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 558