Velma Swanston Howard

Gosta Berling's Saga Velma Swanston Howard

Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and her novel, Gosta Berling's Saga, her best known work. The eponymous hero, a country pastor whose appetite for alcohol and indiscretions ends his career, falls in with a dozen vagrant Swedish cavaliers and enters into a power struggle with the richest woman in the province. This is one of the most charming and intriguing books that you will read in a long time. Not exactly a novel, rather a collection of (sometimes closely, sometimes loosely) linked short stories; you probably have never seen anything quite like it.