Here are 100 books that The Same Country fans have personally recommended if you like
The Same Country.
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Jill Leovy, author of Ghettoside, is a journalist and independent researcher who covered the Los Angeles Police Department and homicide for fifteen years, and who is currently working on a book dealing with murder and feud in human history. She has covered hundreds of street homicides and shadowed patrol cops, and she spent several years embedded in homicide detective units. More recently, she has been a Harvard sociology fellow and a featured speaker on Homer and violence at St. John's College, New Mexico. She is a senior fellow at the USC Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
The University of Michigan professor-emeritus William Ian Miller is, of course, essential reading on violence and revenge, particularly his Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga, Iceland.
But Miller has been so deservedly lauded elsewhere – and his books so widely recommended – that I'm using this space to suggest that readers also open his sources. Among the sagas, Njal's Saga is much more complex than this one, and probably more revealing of the Saga tradition. But I'm a fan of the shorter, more readable Hrafnkel's, not least because I have a weakness for spooky horses.
Hrafnkel is a bully who would not pay compensation, and the arc of his distinctly pre-modern biography is not what you might expect. In fact, it will make you realize exactly how much what we call "modern" is really a product of legal development, including our ideas about satisfying narratives.
Written around the thirteenth century AD by Icelandic monks, the seven tales collected here offer a combination of pagan elements tightly woven into the pattern of Christian ethics. They take as their subjects figures who are heroic, but do not fit into the mould of traditional heroes. Some stories concern characters in Iceland - among them Hrafknel's Saga, in which a poor man's son is murdered by his powerful neighbour, and Thorstein the Staff-Struck, which describes an ageing warrior's struggle to settle into a peaceful rural community. Others focus on the adventures of Icelanders abroad, including the compelling Audun's Story,…
Purely by accident I stumbled on to a 1961 Penguin translation of Njáls saga and it was a transformative moment in my life. I signed up for Old Norse the next term, and never looked back. The sagas were incomparably intelligent in matters of psychology and politics and interpersonal interaction. And then told with such wit. How could the utter miracle of the fluorescence of so much pure genius on a volcanic island in the middle of nowhere not grab you? And what confluence of friendly stars would allow me to spend a life teaching and writing about them in a law school no less, paid as if I were a real lawyer?
An excellent account of this supremely intelligent Machiavellian rogue and wit of a Norwegian king by the eminent Norwegian historian and namesake Sverre Bagge. King Sverrir’s saga was written by an Icelander with the king looking over his shoulder and apparently dictating portions of it. Nothing quite captures a medieval insurgency any better than this saga when read through the lens of Bagge’s astute commentary.
My great-grand aunt Blanche Ames was a co-founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts. My grandmother marched in birth control parades with Blanche. My mother stood in the Planned Parenthood booth at the Minnesota State Fair and responded calmly to those who shouted and spit at her. As the lead author and associate editor of the monumental reference work Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States, which helped to launch the field of women’s history in the 1970s, I learned to love American women’s history, and I’ve always loved writing. Lemons in the Garden of Love is my third award-winning historical novel.
This is a page-turner of a novel about a shooting at a women’s reproductive health services clinic in Mississippi, where the 15-year-old daughter of the hostage negotiator is caught inside the clinic. A variety of people are trapped inside the clinic for hours that day. The shooter, the daughter, the hostage negotiator, the abortion doctor, a pro-life protestor who was spying inside the clinic, and a woman who just had an abortion in the clinic–their characters and motivations are all very understandable to me, which makes the tension about this horrible situation that much more riveting.
When Vonita opened the doors of the Center that morning, she had no idea that it would be for the last time.
Wren has missed school to come to the Center, the sole surviving women's reproductive health clinic in the state, chaperoned by her aunt, Bex. Olive told Peg she was just coming for a check-up. Janine is undercover, a pro-life protester disguised as a patient. Joy needs to terminate her pregnancy. Louie is there to perform a service for these women, not in spite of his faith, but because of it.
When a desperate and distraught gunman bursts into…
In 2005, the Bookseller declared the Viking romance to be officially dead and never, ever coming back. However, they hadn’t consulted Harlequin Historical editors who researched the actual sales and desires of their readers. When my senior editor asked me if could I write one, I duly obliged with Taken by the Viking. The book beat lofty expectations, and the revival began such that the Viking period now ranks up there with Regency in terms of popular time periods for the line. The following list is some of the Viking set romances that I have escaped into on mainly rainy afternoons.
These seven actual sagas (really more adventure stories) from the Viking era have it all – famous warriors, thrilling adventures, and intrepid women.
My favorite of the seven is Halfdan Eysteinsson which has a great hero and an even better heroine – Ingigerd who swaps places with her maid and earns her place as a warrior and avenges her father’s death before finding true love. Not to be missed.
Combining traditional myth, oral history and re-worked European legend to depict an ancient realm of heroism and wonder, the seven tales collected here are among the most fantastical of all the Norse romances. Powerfully inspired works of Icelandic imagination, they relate intriguing, often comical tales of famous kings, difficult gods and women of great beauty, goodness or cunning. The tales plunder a wide range of earlier literature from Homer to the French romances - as in the tale of the wandering hero Arrow-Odd, which combines several older legends, or Egil and Asmund, where the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops…
Wendy Lee Hermance was heard on National Public Radio (NPR) stations with her Missouri Folklore series in the 1980s. She earned a journalism degree from Stephens College, served as Editor and Features Writer for Midwestern and Southern university and regional publications, then settled into writing real estate contracts. In 2012 she attended University of Sydney, earning a master’s degree by research thesis. Her books include Where I’m Going with this Poem, a memoir in poetry and prose. Weird Foods of Portugal: Adventures of an Expatmarks her return to feature writing as collections of narrative non-fiction stories.
As weird as Portugal is, and has been, it may become weirder yet as it absorbs masses of migrants from unexpected places. Unsheltered is fiction that I found accurately portrays the shock and terror of American life for hundreds of millions of families, driving many to migrate. The family portrayed in the book are solidly middle-class, educated professionals. They “did everything right” in the “richest country on the planet,” yet find themselves on a downward slide with no way back to security. Vineland, New Jersey in its present state, and in its 19th-century aspirational origin is the compelling setting. One great thing Kingsolver does is to give hope, creating “new normals” of happiness in frugality.
The Portuguese figured this out ages ago. It's called “soup.”
THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORANGE PRIZE WINNER AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER BARBARA KINGSOLVER
2016 Vineland Meet Willa Knox, a woman who stands braced against an upended world that seems to hold no mercy for her shattered life and family - or the crumbling house that contains her.
1871 Vineland Thatcher Greenwood, the new science teacher, is a fervent advocate of the work of Charles Darwin, and he is keen to communicate his ideas to his students. But those in power in Thatcher's small town have no desire for a new world order. Thatcher and his teachings are not welcome.
As the author of a historical/mystery/romance series that has won over sixty international awards in multiple categories, I’m attracted to books that cannot be pinned to one genre. I love sweeping sagas with elements of all three, perhaps because I was so immersed in classic literature as a kid and fascinated by stories of the past. I suspect I may have once lived in the 1930s and, having yet to discover a handy time machine lying around, I have resorted to writing about the era as a way of getting myself back there. I am, not surprisingly, addicted to period dramas and big band music.
I read all of Catherine Cookson’s novels at a much too-young age, having “borrowed” them from my mom’s bookshelf when she wasn’t looking. I was immediately hooked. So many of Cookson’s books, not just The Girl, pit the wealthy, landed class against their poorer servants, and this theme made a deep impression on me. In fact, I think that Cookson, along with Dickens, probably had the most influence on my personal writing style.
She appeared in Ned Riley's stable yard like some wraith of the morning mist to seek Ned's help. Her name was Hannah Boyle, she was eight years old, and she had walked many miles from Newcastle with her mother, who was seriously ill.
Purely by accident I stumbled on to a 1961 Penguin translation of Njáls saga and it was a transformative moment in my life. I signed up for Old Norse the next term, and never looked back. The sagas were incomparably intelligent in matters of psychology and politics and interpersonal interaction. And then told with such wit. How could the utter miracle of the fluorescence of so much pure genius on a volcanic island in the middle of nowhere not grab you? And what confluence of friendly stars would allow me to spend a life teaching and writing about them in a law school no less, paid as if I were a real lawyer?
This is from the master of saga studies of the past half-century. His knowledge of Old Norse literature is unsurpassed. He takes you through how the miracle of the sagas came about. Moreover, he writes well. His prose is clear and elegant. I also wish to steer readers to a perfect gem of an article Andersson wrote that actually manages to say something quite new about the more than a century-old fight in saga studies as to whether the sagas owe their excellence to an oral culture or to a written one: “Sea Traffic in the Sagas: Quantitative Reflections” in The Creation of Medieval Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of Sverre Bagge, edited by Leidulf Melve and Sigbjørn Sønnesyn (Oslo: Dreyer, 2012), 156–75.
In this book, Theodore M. Andersson, a leading scholar of the Norse sagas, introduces readers to the development of the Icelandic sagas between 1180 and 1280, a crucial period that witnessed a gradual shift of emphasis from tales of adventure and personal distinction to the analysis of political and historical propositions. Beginning with the first full-length sagas and culminating in the acknowledged masterpiece Njals saga, Andersson emphasizes a historical perspective, establishing a chronology for seventeen of the most important sagas and showing how they evolve thematically and stylistically over the century under study.
Revisiting the long-standing debate about the oral…
Purely by accident I stumbled on to a 1961 Penguin translation of Njáls saga and it was a transformative moment in my life. I signed up for Old Norse the next term, and never looked back. The sagas were incomparably intelligent in matters of psychology and politics and interpersonal interaction. And then told with such wit. How could the utter miracle of the fluorescence of so much pure genius on a volcanic island in the middle of nowhere not grab you? And what confluence of friendly stars would allow me to spend a life teaching and writing about them in a law school no less, paid as if I were a real lawyer?
This book, from a fin de siècle Scotsman, is a classic of literature in its own right. It contains a perfectly brilliant reading of the sagas as well as other works of medieval literature. It has never been surpassed and is perhaps unsurpassable. Every sentence is an elegant gem, with one nonobvious insight after another. He just nails it. Ker reminds you that literary criticism need not be pretentious and badly written as it so often is. Treat yourself.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D., taught Norse mythology at multiple universities (including UCLA, Berkeley, and Colorado) for over a decade before becoming a full-time public educator on Old Norse myth and language via his translations and Youtube channel in 2020. He is passionate about presenting the authentic, undistorted medieval stories in clear, thrilling, modern English.
The closest thing to a "novel" from medieval Scandinavia, The Saga of the Volsungs was written down in the 1200s in Iceland by an author who knew the poems about the Volsungs in the Poetic Edda, but also knew a vast wealth of additional poems about them that are otherwise lost to us. Rather than transmit the poems directly, this unknown author chose to attempt to put together a cohesive story of the sprawling generations of this family, beginning with the fathering of their first ancestor by the god Odin and continuing through all the events that lead Odin himself to engineer the death of its last generations. Here we have dwarves forging magic swords, dragon-slayers, Valkyries laboring under the weight of ill-considered oaths, and star-crossed lovers seeking bloody revenge. This volume also includes the medieval "fanfic" sequel, The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrók, written shortly after The Saga of the…
From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.
Have you ever done something on a whim and fallen in love with it? That was how I found Old Norse literature. I was taught the Norse language by reading the prose and poetry of medieval Iceland. In reading their literature, I discovered a rich, vibrant society filled with complex, passionate people. Here were doomed romantics, poets, and philosophers–along with chieftains and priests facing complex political and religious change. I undertook a PhD to study their literary craft. I hope, if nothing else, that my novel might encourage readers to go off and read the sagas themselves. And, if I am really lucky, they may just enjoy my stories too.
If you ever want proof that medieval Iceland was far more complex than Vikings, I invite you to read this book. A series of shorter sagas that focuses upon the stories of skalds–or poets–who each face a doomed love affair. Be it Kormakr and his passionate poetry for Steingerðr or Gunnlaugr and how he loses his love even as he gains in prestige–these stories really made clear to me how complex and human ancient Iceland was.
Even now, we understand the dangers of falling in love with someone we should not, and which of us hasn’t made choices we regret when it comes to love? The Sagas of Warrior Poets has action, but at its heart, it is a series of love stories.
Kormak's Saga, The Saga of Hallfred Troublesome-Poet, The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People, Viglund's Saga Set in the farmsteads of Viking age Iceland at a time when the old ethos of honour and heroic adventure merged with new ideas of romantic infatuation, each of these sagas features poet heroes, complex love triangles, and travels to foreign lands.
