Online Nordic Book Club

Read and discuss Scandinavian literature in translation as part of our Nordic Book Club, now online! Each month we select a novel from some of the best Nordic literary voices.

On February 7, we’ll be discussing The Reindeer Hunters by Lars Mytting, who discussed the novel with us in November in a virtual book talk.

The year is 1903 in the village of Butangen, Norway, and 22 years have passed since Astrid Hekne, a local girl, gave birth to twin sons. One of them, Jehans, is as rebellious as his mother. Cast out from the village, he lives on a struggling homestead in the mountains, where he fishes and hunts reindeer for his livelihood. One August morning, Jehans kills a massive reindeer buck and, at the same moment, encounters an enigmatic hunter — a young Englishman named Victor Harrison.

Meanwhile, at the new church in the village, Pastor Kai Schweigaard is tormented by his past betrayal: the sale of the old stave church, including the loss of the church’s mystical twin sister bells. As waterfalls are tamed and the first flash of electric light is seen in the village night, World War I approaches, while brother stands against brother.

Conceived on an epic scale, The Reindeer Hunters is a novel about love and bitter rivalries, sorrow and courage, and a world with a mythic and mystical undercurrent battling the pull of the future. The second in Mytting’s Sister Bells trilogy, it is both a sequel to The Bell in the Lake and a stand-alone novel.