Norway should need little introduction: at the far north of continental Europe, it has a long eastern border with Sweden, a shorter border with Finland and an even shorter border with Russia. It is a constitutional monarchy, which was unified with Denmark from 1537 to 1814, and with Sweden from 1814 to 1905. The king, as of five weeks ago when his father died, is Haakon VIII.
The main language of Norway is Norwegian, but it’s not quite as simple as that, because there are two official written versions of the language: Bokmål, which is a bit like Danish, and Nynorsk, which is a bit like Bokmål.
The daughter of two friends of mine scored what turned out to be the decisive winning answer for her team in last week’s University Challenge when she correctly answered the question, “which country has the world’s largest sovereign wealth find?” The answer is, of course, Norway.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Liberia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sophie’s World | Jostein Gaarder | 292,713 | 20,997 | 21,930 |
| A Doll’s House | Henrik Ibsen | 170,642 | 6,294 | 24,298 |
| The Snowman | Jo Nesbø | 156,960 | 6,135 | 13,219 |
| The Redbreast | Jo Nesbø | 112,704 | 4,994 | 6,966 |
| Hunger | Knut Hamsun | 68,826 | 5,533 | 5,850 |
| Nemesis | Jo Nesbø | 82,836 | 3,690 | 5,029 |
| The Devil’s Star | Jo Nesbø | 79,176 | 3,690 | 4,901 |
| My Struggle, Volume One | Karl Ove Knausgård | 52,392 | 3,547 | 5,443 |
(Both Nemesis and The Devil’s Star had the same number of LibraryThing owners – it’s not a mistake.)
For once, I have read more than half of these. Sophie’s World is this week’s winner, thanks to topping the leagues for Goodreads and LibraryThing; It was also the winner when I previously did this exercise in 2015. It’s about a young girl in the (entirely real) Norwegian town of Lillesand, exploring philosophy.
A Doll’s House is this week’s winner on StoryGraph. It’s a nineteenth century play about a woman who realises that she has been treated like a doll for her entire life, and established Ibsen’s reputation. (Hedda Gabler was some way below my cutoff, and Peer Gynt further down still.)
Jo Nesbø’s series of novels featuring detective Harry Hole are deservedly classics. I described The Snowman as “a very vivid evocation of ordinary people in a small, cold country trying to grapple with extraordinary and awful things”.
Hunger, published in 1890, is about a young homeless man in Christiania, now Oslo, and helped to get its author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.
My Struggle is a multi-volume autobiographical novel about awful family dynamics.
Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained My Struggle at the expense of another Nesbø novel, The Leopard.
I disqualified only two books. The Woman in Cabin 10, by Ruth Ware, is set on a cruise ship on its way to Norway, and as far as I can tell the majority of it happens before they reach port. The Bat, another Nesbø novel, is set in Australia.
The top book set in Norway by a woman is The History of Bees, the first of the Climate Quartet by Norwegian writer Maja Lunde. Sigrid Undset and Kristin Lavransdatter are bubbling under.
I have myself been to Norway only once, for an International Crisis Group meeting in 2023.
Apart from those listed above, I have recently read the first two volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter, and will get to the third before long. I also recommend a Norwegian assessment of their own failed mediation in Sri Lanka.
Next up are Finland, Mauretania, Ireland and Slovakia; I was a little tempted to drop Scotland in after Finland, but unfortunately I know what the winning book will be. (HP and the P’s S.)
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel | Laos | Turkmenistan | Kyrgyzstan | Hong Kong | Singapore | Lebanon | Palestine | Oman
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba | Nicaragua | Paraguay | El Salvador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo | Sierra Leone | Libya | Liberia
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus | Bulgaria | Serbia | Denmark
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea