Sad Tales from Denmark — John Lynch

A Danish priest marries an Inuit woman in Greenland; an old woman is sent to the village workhouse; a peasant farmer and his wife struggle to rebuild their dilapidated cottage and work hard on their small-holding, only for the wife to die of cancer; three of the moving stories in Sad Tales from Denmark, by Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943), who in 1917 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his "authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark". He advocated social and political reform and satirised the authoritarian Danish government of the day. His sympathies lay with the poor rural proletariat, about whom he writes in these stories, with humanity, but with merciless realism and wry humour. An entertaining read for both the student of realist literature and for the general reader of fiction, here rendered elegantly into English by John Lynch, with a Foreword by Lars Peter Rømhild, formerly Lecturer in Literature at the University of Copenhagen.