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For nearly four decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia of her own making, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser's Scandinavia is disproportionately populated with police officers, but also with the stuff of everyday life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the novels she read: a fully realized world complete with its own traditions, customs, and, of course, people.
Over the course of many years, Lesser's fictional Scandinavia grew more and more solidly visible to her, yet she never had a strong desire to visit the real countries that corresponded to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, "between one day and the next, that no longer seemed sufficient." It was time to travel to Scandinavia.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 18, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781705251232
- File size: 234297 KB
- Duration: 08:08:07
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Kirsten Potter takes on the voice of the author to narrate this audiobook, which is part memoir and part literary analysis of Scandinavian noir. Potter's easy style makes comprehensible a dizzying amount of detail on authors' names, book titles, and plot summaries. Potter's delivery helps integrate the elements of an interwoven story of one woman's growing fascination with Nordic crime fiction and her ensuing critiques of the most famous names and books in the genre. At the heart of this hybrid project is a love of reading and travel. Listeners will be inspired to do more of both through Potter's expert handling of the dense material. Listeners become engaged in the story behind the stories, both the author's and those she dissects. M.R. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
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