Dorthe Nors is one of the best-known Danish writers whose fiction works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In this travelogue, she describes in wonderful poetic prose her travel from Copenhagen to her native Jutland and its coastal villages. The book is divided into 14 essays, each focusing on a different section of the North Sea coast. Nors intertwines the stories of her youth, growing up among these windswept landscapes, and the history of the region, from its Viking legacy to the Nazi occupation, still evidenced by the bunkers scattered along the coast. Offering a rare glimpse into this region, its culture, rituals, and traditions, this book is also a meditation on how our psyche is shaped by the geographies we inhabit.

Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark’s most acclaimed writers, is a descendant of this line; for generations, her family lived among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. Returning after decades of inhabiting cities, she chronicles a year spent travelling up and down the coast, tracing the history and geography of the places she visits and untangling her relationship with the landscape she calls home.

This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who live in these wild places and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of shipwrecks and storm surges, of cold-water surfers, sun-creased beach mums and resolute sailor’s wives. In spellbinding prose, Nors invites the reader on a journey through history and memory – the landscape’s as well as her own.

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