The Boat in the Evening — Tarjei Vesaas

From the author of The Ice Palace and The Birds

The critical acclaim which greeted The Boat in the Evening confirmed Tarjei Vesaas's place among the finalists for the Nobel Prize for Literature for the third time. A series of semi-autobiographical sketches, The Boat in the Eveningevokes intensely poetic scenes with cinematic beauty: a colony of cranes arrive at their mating ground to play out a delicate ritual drama; a boy and his father clear a road together in a pitiless snowstorm; a drowning man floats down river towards rescue.

Vesaas felt the book, which has drawn favourable comparisons with Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot, to be the culmination of his life's experience. And, indeed, this profound and beautiful novel, with its sensuous appreciation of nature, was to be his last published work.