The most recommended books about Norway

A more recently released historical fiction account of a young girl’s loyalty and daring decisions on a North Sea island off the coast of Norway is The Klipfish Code. Published two years before my own book, I had not read it until a reviewer compared my debut book to this suspenseful story. I read it immediately, humbled by the comparison. Twelve-year-old Marit is living with her grandpa, who she resents for not actively protesting the German occupiers of their island. She’s outspoken, angry, and eager to support the resistance, despite his cautions and concerns. I was intrigued by this transition period in German policy. They traded propaganda and persuasion for coercion, including arresting one in ten teachers across the country, sending them to labor camps to make them agree to teach Nazi lies within the classroom. The terror of this little-known action compounds Marit’s struggle to decipher a code,… show more.

Ruth Maier was a Jew born in Germany. Kristallnacht, an infamous Nazi pogrom, took place in 1938. Ruth was able to flee to Norway shortly thereafter.

She soon became fluent in Norwegian, finished high school, and began her university studies. However, the Germans occupied Norway in 1940. She, therefore, lived in constant fear of being arrested and kept a very detailed diary of how she lived through these two dangerous years. She was then arrested in 1942 at age 22 and deported to Auschwitz, where she was immediately put to death. 

This is a book I read as a teen that inspired me to write war stories. I loved it because it doesn’t glorify war; Brian Callison is a master of writing about war as it is, from multiple perspectives, in all its bloody, brutal horror.

The action is great but almost secondary to the memorable characters he creates, and Brian Callison writes dialogue the way soldiers really talk. If you like this one, he's written a dozen more like it, and they haven't aged.

I love cold, northern places and dogs, and, if you haven’t already noticed, warts-and-all stories about women finding strength they didn’t know they had in the wilderness. Blair Braverman’s memoir checks all these boxes. As a teenager, she goes to a folk school in the Norwegian Arctic and learns to work with sled dogs, something she later continues as a guide in Alaska. (Braverman is now a professional musher and has run the Iditarod.) The book’s subtitle is Chasing Fear and Finding Home In the Great White North, and Braverman is unsparing in her exploration of fear rooted in both the human and natural world. I read this book on a series of airplanes in one long travel day, and I’m still reminded of it every time I see Braverman’s delightful Twitter stories about her dogs.

A harrowing and beautiful tale of two sisters growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother. The author describes a fine line between gentle artistic creativity and debilitating mental illness. The reader will come away with a better understanding of how deeply children are affected growing up in a dysfunctional and traumatic environment. A mother's love and a journey to forgiveness teach us the complex meaning of love.

I absolutely fell in love with twelve-year-old Bart—a kid who doesn’t complain when there are only pretzel sticks for dinner, who takes boxing lessons, but can’t punch, a kid who loves opera. Opera! (Specifically, the voice of baritone Bryn Terfel--Look him up and listen!) He lives near Oslo, Norway in shabby public housing with his loving, alcoholic, and often unemployed mother. Bart makes the best of everything in his life. His unique, gentle nature, some lovely friendships, and Svingen’s storytelling completely won my heart. I don’t know why this book hasn’t gotten more accolades—maybe because people expect every Norwegian novel to have Vikings and fjords. (Language Alert: There are some instances of the word sh*t—blame the translator).

This novel has everything I love – a narrator who’s definitely not telling us everything, newly arrived in a remote house by a lake in Norway that is so clearly drawn I can see and feel it in my bones.

Trond has secrets and this is where he’s going to live now. There’s a man down the track whose window he can see when it falls dark. A river flows fast beyond the trees. Petterson’s beautiful, spare writing creates a filmic atmosphere in which past mysteries unfold as Trond begins to learn to live alone with his past.

Stunning story-telling, wonderful place-setting, and a character utterly unlike me that I loved reading in his solitude.

It may be a cliche but my first experience with nordic noir was The Killing (Forbrydelsen). This Danish TV series in which inspector Sarah Lund goes in search of the murderer of a young girl fascinated me enormously. Not only because of the oppressive atmosphere that grabs you by the throat at times, but also because of the fantastic character development. The series was created by Søren Sveistrup, the author of the equally magisterial The Chestnut Man. The book begins when a young woman is found horribly mutilated in a playground on a chilly October morning. Next to her is a doll made of chestnuts and sticks. When a chestnut man is also found at the scene of a subsequent murder, it is clear that a serial killer is at work.

Another cautionary story. This story shows that the Nazi movement is growing worldwide and that governments need to keep these organizations under wraps before allowing them to carry out their own agendas. 

When a mistake causes an international incident during a US Presidential visit to Norway, Detective Harry Hole is placed out of sight in the Federal Police Department, until matters settle. Unable to sit still, Harry investigates a neo-Nazi group and comes across someone practicing with an exotic rifle that would only be used to assassinate someone. Now he must identify both the target and the killer.

Oakley is a master at writing historical fiction. This novel takes place in Norway during the Nazi occupation.

Based on her thorough study of documents and extensive interviews with relevant individuals in Norway, she has created characters who are patriots (jøssing), characters who go over to the German side and are as cruel as if not crueler than the Nazis, and characters who try to appear neutral so as not to put themselves or their families in harm’s way.

The protagonist is the leader of a vast resistance network in Norway with strong ties to the British military. The fear is palpable. The reader is in constant dread that the jøssings will be caught, tortured, and killed.