Degerfors Bibliotek

How strange and terrifying it must be to leave your home and journey to lands unknown to seek a better life.

Bojer's novel tells of a group of young Norwegian villagers who decide to emigrate to North Dakota, where they find that 'breaking the sod and surviving blizzards' is easier than feeling at home in this new land.
It is a story of the hardships and joys, successes and setbacks, and perhaps most of all, the longing for both Norway and the US.

These are the same feelings felt today by anyone that leaves the country they were born in to go and make a home in a new foreign place. It can be very hard to fit in and sometimes to be accepted for who you are by the local population.
This isn’t a story about the grass being greener on the other side for this group of Norwegians, but rather the different ups and downs of life which they found over the Atlantic.

The story in this novel is a story as well known among the emigrants that arrive today, as it was among the emigrants that arrived almost 100 years ago.

Johan Bojer (born Johan Kristoffer Hansen) was a popular Norwegian novelist and dramatist. He grew up as a foster child in a poor family living in Rissa near Trondheim, Norway. He learned the realities of poverty early in his life.

Bojer principally wrote about the lives of the poor farmers and fishermen, both in his native Norway and among the Norwegian immigrants in the United States. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times and is best remembered for his novel 'The Emigrants', a major novel dealing with the motivations and trials of Norwegians that emigrated to the plains of North Dakota.