The Former World

The story of the two Hansen sisters, Nik and Maj, continues in the sequel to Fossil Island. Now sixteen, Nik resumes her relationship with the passionate musician Carl Nielsen, who returns for a summer visit to the provincial village in Denmark where she lives with her family. But their bonds are strained by convention, by Carl's dream of becoming a great composer, and by Nik's own stirrings of ambition to study art. Now twenty-one, Maj finds a teaching job away from home, but her mother hasn't given up the idea that her eldest daughter will marry locallyperhaps Schoolmaster Strandgaard, a widower, whose children are Nik's friends.

Over the course of two dramatic years, the sisters' lives will be utterly changed by love, heartbreak, illness, and death. A vivid portrait of two stubborn young women who love their family yet yearn for freedom, The Former World re-creates a time when women's lives and Danish society were in transition. Whether learning to cycle or dreaming of teaching school in Brooklyn, Nik and Maj are memorable characters in a setting both distant in time and familiar.

Fossil Island and its sequel, The Former World, are inspired by the true story of Denmark's greatest composer, Carl Nielsen, and on the life of Emilie Demant Hatt, who later became an artist and ethnographer in Lapland.

Sjoholm gives readers vibrant characters whose personal travails are all the more engrossing for the cultural upheavals that energize them. An entertaining, thoughtful story of old-fashioned romance, complicated by dawning modern mores.   Kirkus Reviews

Sjoholm's secondary characters are uniformly well drawn, and her small cast of main characters breathe with vitality and human complexity. Her skill at rendering the society of a forgotten Denmark somehow makes that world feel both particular and universal. These are thoughtful, glitteringly intelligent novels, as shrewd about shifting social conditions as they are about the workings of the human heart. Editor's Choice, Historical Novel Review

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