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A Year on the North Sea Coast
by Dorthe Nors
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.
"In this graceful, lyrical text, Nors gathers 14 essays about the North Sea Coast of Denmark, which is, for her, both legacy and landscape...As the book progresses, Nors touches on a variety of intriguing rituals and landmarks...An intricate reckoning with a world that, despite our best attempts to tame it, remains elemental and wild." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Danish novelist Nors makes her first foray into nonfiction with this poetic chronicle of her time spent along Denmark's North Sea coast...Nors's portrait of her connection to a landscape both "harsh and mild" enchants." - Publishers Weekly
"A revelation. In 14 eloquent, observant essays that combine journalism, nature writing and memoir, Nors paints a vivid portrait of a remote and rugged territory whose striking scenery masks more than its share of dangers... A Line in the World will appeal to a wide audience of discerning and curious readers." - Shelf Awareness
"Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction draws a beautiful, delicate line into which swims time, space, place, borders and what it means to belong. A deep dive into a coastal landscape, both breathtaking and hypnotic, it is a journey towards your own heart and what it means to truly belong." - Natasha Carthew, author of Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience
"These masterful essays give a strong, personal, and moving portrait of a landscape and of a mind—about loneliness, memory and belonging, in wind and waves, time, place. The light flowing through Nors's writing is breathtaking; it is hypnotic, consoling." - Gunnhild Øyehaug, author of Present Tense Machine
"A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors's deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it." - Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
This information about A Line in the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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