About the Book
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
An exhilarating, moving account of life on the wild Danish coast, from one of Denmark's most acclaimed writers
'A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast' Katherine May, author of Wintering
This is the story of the windswept coastline that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to the Netherlands, a world of shipwrecks and storm surges, of cold-water surfers and resolute sailors' wives. In spellbinding prose, award-winning writer Dorthe Nors invites the reader to travel through the landscape where her family lived for generations and which she now calls home. It is an extraordinarily powerful and beautiful journey through history and memory - the landscape's as well as her own.
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FURTHER PRAISE FOR A LINE IN THE WORLD
'A place brimming with memories and strangeness, where storms surge and lighthouses blink... fascinating' Financial Times'A singular prose stylist... Nors is such a great companion, honest and curious and surprising' Max Porter, author of Lanny
'Brilliant... a personal, poetic meditation on this remote edge of windswept landscapes and wildwaters' New York Times
'The perfect winter read, making a virtue of dark nights and frost-bitten winds on the author's native North Sea coast' Observer
'A deep dive into a coastal landscape, both breathtaking and hypnotic' Natasha Carthew, author of Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience
About the Author :
Dorthe Nors was born in 1970 and studied literature at Aarhus University. Her short stories have appeared in numerous international publications including the Boston Review, Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker. Nors's works include Wild Swims, Karate Chop, Minna Needs Rehearsal Space and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal - shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize - which are all published by Pushkin Press. Born in rural Jutland, she lives on the North Sea coast in Denmark.
Caroline Waight is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, Norwegian and German. She lives and works in London.
Review :
Touchingly personal and poetic... brimming with memories and strangeness, where storms surge and lighthouses blink
The perfect winter read, making a virtue of dark nights and frost-bitten winds on the author's native North Sea coast
A personal, poetic meditation on this remote edge of windswept landscapes and wild waters... immediacy and an intimacy filter through her spare, brilliant prose
At its heart this is a book that will speak to anyone who has ever felt their identity being wrought in the schism between urbanism and the wilder beyond. Nors has been forged there, and her poetic, wave-tossed writing speaks of its hold.
Magic... sometimes funny, sometimes chilling, always involving. This is a wonderful holiday in a very fine writer's heart
A Line in the World is starkly, achingly beautiful. With stunning intimacy and precision-as attentive to tiny details in nature as she is to vast cloudless skies-Nors shows us how places and their histories shape who we are and how we find home.
A singular prose stylist walks the stormy shore of the North Sea along Denmark's wild coast. She is such a great companion, honest and curious and surprising. It made me want to walk in salty (polluted) air, and see Danish rural church frescoes, and go to towns where I wouldn't be especially welcome, and be soaked in the strange history of an end-of-the world spot.
Ms. Nors is ever on the hunt for the secret seams of passion-whether from terror or jubilation-beneath the stark surface of the land and behind the faces of its button-lipped inhabitants. . . . The tone here, in Caroline Waight's translation, is gentle and considered. It has clearly been [Nors's] intention to avoid both tourist gawking and big-city condescension, and the result is both revealing and respectful. . . . Beautiful.
A Line in the World is... one of the first books to capture the unique region in English. In prose that is as sparse and quiet as the marshy Jutland peninsula itself, the book provides a snapshot of life in a location that is full of history and at the same time every-shifting, its future is uncertain.
You need real nerve to gaze unfaltering at the sea, and to walk untremblingly along the high creaking edges of the land, and life, and ideas. Nors is one of the very rare writers with that nerve, and it is spectacularly displayed in this taut, uncompromising, glittering book. Most of us are dangerously content with the appearance of things. If that's you, don't read this book, which cuts straight to the heart
Dorthe Nors is one of those rare authors - like Sebald - who can bring a place to the page so that you forget the outside world while reading. And there are lines of such astonishing beauty in this book, that I find myself circling back to them like landmarks in their own right. In reading about her home coast, I've felt my compass shift - I must find these shorelines now and walk them...
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.
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
Lyrical, luminescent, and yet rigorously concrete, Dorthe Nors's keen understanding of the intricacies of place and the tensions inherent in attachment make the Danish coast come to life. I loved seeing this landscape through her eyes, but most of all I loved the inheritance of observation, experience, and beauty contained within this volume.
This is a strong work of art that works on several levels. A book that pierces its way into something quintessentially Danish and Jutlandish, without ever appearing provincial, while at all times maintaining its grand outlook... It is a book you know that you will return to once you put it down
With an eye for detail, humour, and poetry, Dorthe Nors captures part of the coastal people's soul through her own memories, and passes it on to the rest of us, so that we can feel for ourselves how it relates to us.
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' writing is breathtaking, it is hypnotic, consoling.
A Line in the World is... a confluence of eons, of feeling, of inarticulable precision-and it pulled me under. Dorthe Nors writes with the cool might of the North Atlantic tide, coasting from naval hubris and a dwindling, seaside matriarchy to geological phenomena and modern displacement. Such scope and focus is a feat, an occurrence of those poignant, silty histories which only an artist of Nors's caliber can catch.
The first book of nonfiction from the iconoclastic Danish author... graceful, lyrical... An intricate reckoning with a world that, despite our best attempts to tame it, remains elemental and wild
Nors's portrait of her connection to a landscape both "harsh and mild" enchants
A stunning portrayal of the connection between landscape, human beings, and memory on the Danish west coast... [Dorthe Nors's] rhythm, her stillness, her humility, her ability to finish calm sentences as if they were a song... This is a masterpiece.
Dorthe Nors's writing is both poetic and harsh, laconic and ironic, and with an impressionable clarity that yet always seems to be keeping secrets, hidden between sentences and words. Her prose makes its way into the landscape and the soul, which opens up and receives
A languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark . . . vivid . . . nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.
Dorthe Nors is an author unlike anyone else
It is hard to imagine a Danish writer who could have portrayed the region in a more fascinating way. The method is poetic and candid... Nors points out that it is women's turn to put the landscape into words
These are texts that are so well-written and complete... Both the long history, and [Nors'] own personal story are gathered in points on the map
Her unreserved love for the coastal landscape is the engine that drives the text forward... There is a seductive intimacy at stake in these encounters with nature
A journey in [Nors's] company is never a dull prospect... Along this mutable coast, on the border between map and myth, Nors is in her element'
Dorthe Nors writes so well that she can make a grain of sand become interesting. Her writing is straightforward and narrative in one moment. Deeply wistful and melancholic in the next. Self-reflecting, observant, and poetic throughout.
A personal, poetic meditation on this remote edge of windswept landscapes and wild waters... immediacy and an intimacy filter through her spare, brilliant prose
By beautifully combining facts and personal impressions, Dorthe Nors has succeeded in convincingly bringing the North Sea coast to life.
[Dorthe Nors is] an exceptional chronicler of the character, stories and sheer unashamed presence of the Jutland coast... [Nors[ walks the path between herself and the landscape perfectly
The landscapes of Dorthe Nors's A Line in the World - a story of shipwrecks and storm surges, cold-water surfers, sun-creased beach mums and resolute sailor's wives - persist in the memory as a painterly afterglow. [...] It's also a beautifully written book. [...] Nors can fix a scene with one detail
[Dorthe Nors] orients herself among dust and dirt, sea and sand, brilliantly capturing specks of memories which dance in the light... The hum of impending destruction is audible in each essay, magnified by Nors' aching attention to the world as we know it and have known it.. Catastrophe and opportunity go hand-in-hand, she reminds us, and our fears are conditioned by place-bound history, by the memories passed down to us.
[Nors] embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark, from Rudbøl at the German border to Skagen at the northernmost tip. The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces-buildings, ruins, shipwrecks-and this westerly Denmark is less the land of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and sleek Georg Jensen designs than a place of ancient landscapes steeped in myth. [...] nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.
A masterpiece of place-based nonfiction
Nors, writing of a place thousands miles away, makes clear that time, space and memory aren't abstract and detached from each other, but held together - the land I live on and in the land she traverses in her book.
This book is beautiful and wild and seeping just like the North Sea coast landscape it's about, Dorthe's writing is soft and quiet in the best ways. [...] The writing has a rhythm and cadence to it that feels like waves coming into share and going back. Dorthe covers everything from witch effigies, to activism, to viking ships, but none of it feels forced. It's all needed and fits perfectly.
The tight bond between place and people forms the backbone of this evocative and haunting book, which reminds the reader at every turn that permanence is not promised. [...] Both celebration and elegy, this book will appeal to travelers and homebodies
Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast, and the first one begins at the tops. [...] There are many lines in this world to contemplate in accompanying Dorthe Nors along this one, we access something of the universal in the search for identity and belonging.
