Lucky Per: Introduction by Garth Risk Hallberg (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

A true neglected classic, this sweeping 1904 novel is a Modernist masterpiece and arguably "the great Danish novel"-- but is only newly available in English.

Lucky Per is a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees his restricted life in the Danish countryside for the capital city. Per is a gifted young man who arrives in Copenhagen believing that "you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast . . . and capture and bind it." Per's love interest, a Jewish heiress, is both the strongest character in the book and one of the greatest Jewish heroines of European literature. Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will reshape both Denmark's landscape and its minor place in the world; eventually, both his personal and his career ambitions come to grief. At its heart, the story revolves around the question of the relationship of "luck" to "happiness" (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship Per comes to see differently by the end of his life.

HENRIK PONTOPPIDAN (1857-1943) was a Danish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for "his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark." The son of a rural minister, he moved to Copenhagen as a young man and eventually earned his living as a journalist and writer. He is best known for the sweeping social novels he wrote between 1890 and the 1920s, which "reflect the social, religious, and political struggles of the time."