Recommendations based on "The Notebook"

A New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year (2021)An NPR Best Books of the Year (2021)Called "a masterpiece" by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up―in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark’s most important modern authors.

Read the book that inspired Studio Ghibli's series, Ronja the Robber’s Daughter! A thrilling adventure crafted by the author of Pippi LongstockingOn the night Ronia was born, a thunderstorm raged over the mountain, but in Matt's castle and among his band of robbers there was only joy - for Matt now had a spirited little black-haired daughter. Soon Ronia learns to dance and yell with the robbers, but it is alone in the forest that she feels truly at home. Then one day Ronia meets Birk, the son of Matt's arch-enemy. Soon after Ronia and Birk become friends the worst quarrel ever between the rival bands erupts, and Ronia and Berk are right in the middle.

While taking a car trip through Europe with his father in search of his long-lost mother, a mysterious miniature book about a sailor shipwrecked on a strange island on which a deck of cards has come to life holds the clues to understanding the disappearance of Hans Thomas's mother many years before.

The saga deals with the Viking world in the ninth and tenth centuries and has as its hero Eric Skallagrimsson, a powerful man who is much under the influence of the many-faced god, Odin

"Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation...Fall in love with the world, he enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it." -The New York Times "Poignant and beautiful...Even if you think you won't like Knausgaard, try this one and you'll get him and get why some of us have gone crazy for him." --Los Angeles Review of Books You don't know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don't know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don't know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don't know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night. So begins Spring, the recommencement of Knausgaard's fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his newly born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of what happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one which unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day. Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard's famously sensitive, pensive, and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicenter of this singular literary series.

Jan Fabel is a troubled man. His relationships with the women in his life - his mother, daughter, ex-wife, girlfriend - are becoming increasingly complicated. His professional life as head of the Hamburg murder squad is equally trying. He is trying to resolve a case involving a female nurse who has been murdering elderly patients.

Sandra Hill unleashes her best novel yet. Searching for his little boy, 11th century Viking Thorfinn lands in modern times, where he stumbles upon a dead wringer for his cheating ex-wife. Single mom Lydia Denton mourns the loss of her SEAL husband. Then she meets a man who resembles him. Despite Thorfinn's strange accusations, Lydia finds it impossible to ignore the chemistry between them. And as she gets to know this handsome Viking, she can't help but wonder whether two souls, separated by time, have found their way back together. Watch a QuickTime trailer for this book.

'The best Norwegian novel ever' Karl Ove Knausgaard Mattis doesn't understand much about the world. He doesn't understand why others call him simple. Or why his sister Hege, who has cared for him in their peaceful lakeside cottage since they were young, gets so frustrated. But he knows that the woodcock which starts to fly over their house every day is a sign something is about to change. And when Hege falls in love, disrupting their familiar existence and unbalancing his thoughts, he decides he must face his fate. Translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes 'A masterpiece' Literary Review 'Mattis, absurd and boastful, but also sweet, pathetic and even funny, is shown with great insight' Sunday Times

“[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante.” —SlateA Penguin ClassicKristin Lavransdatter interweaves political, social, and religious history with the daily aspects of family life to create a colorful, richly detailed tapestry of Norway during the fourteenth-century. The trilogy, however, is more than a journey into the past. Undset's own life—her familiarity with Norse sagas and folklore and with a wide range of medieval literature, her experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother, and her deep religious faith—profoundly influenced her writing. Her grasp of the connections between past and present and of human nature itself, combined with the extraordinary quality of her writing, sets her works far above the genre of "historical novels." This new translation by Tina Nunnally—the first English version since Charles Archer's translation in the 1920s—captures Undset's strengths as a stylist. Nunnally, an award-winning translator, retains the natural dialog and lyrical flow of the original Norwegian, with its echoes of Old Norse legends, while deftly avoiding the stilted language and false archaisms of Archer's translation. In addition, she restores key passages left out of that edition.Undset's ability to present a meticulously accurate historical portrait without sacrificing the poetry and narrative drive of masterful storytelling was particularly significant in her homeland. Granted independence in 1905 after five hundred years of foreign domination, Norway was eager to reclaim its national history and culture. Kristin Lavransdatter became a touchstone for Undset's contemporaries, and continues to be widely read by Norwegians today. In the more than 75 years since it was first published, it has also become a favorite throughout the world.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century-- a land of short, blazing, idyllic summers and dark, frost-rimmed winters, of mountains, bear-hunts, and hazardous sea voyages-- Dina's Book centres around a beautiful, eccentric and unpredictable woman who bewitches everyone she meets. At the age of five Dina unwittingly causes her mother's death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. Her guilt becomes her obsession: her unforgiving mother haunts her every day. When she finally returns home she is like a wolf cub, tamed only by her tutor, Lorch, who is able to reach her through music. Married off at sixteen to a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, Jacob, she becomes sexually obsessive and wild. Jacob dies under odd circumstances and Dina becomes mute. When she finally emerges from her trauma, she runs his estate with an iron hand. But still Dina wrestles with her two unappeased ghosts: Jacob and her mother. Until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer, Leo, enters her life and changes it forever...