A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

'Touchingly personal and poetic, A Line in the World . . . see[s] Nors tussle with a place brimming with memories and strangeness, where storms surge and lighthouses blink . . . fascinating.' - Financial Times

'Dorthe Nors's A Line in the World is the perfect winter read, making a virtue of dark nights and frost-bitten winds on the author's native North Sea coast' - Johny Pitts

'A personal, poetic meditation on this remote edge of windswept landscapes and wild waters... immediacy and an intimacy filter through her spare, brilliant prose' - Editor's Pick

'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.' - New Statesman

'Magic... sometimes funny, sometimes chilling, always involving. This is a wonderful holiday in a very fine writer's heart' - Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

Author Bio

Dorthe Nors was born in 1970 and studied literature at the University of Aarhus. Her short stories have appeared in numerous international publications including the Boston Review, Harper's 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.