Edvard Hoem

A Land No One Has Seen

The brothers Eilert and Anton Edvard send each other letters across the Atlantic a few times a year. Both work hard to rid themselves of debt. Europe is ravaged by the first world war, and tens of thousands of people are dying in the trenches on the western front.

In Romsdal Anton Edvard runs a farm that is too small to pay his expenses. In the winter he has to sign up on a fishing boat. It’s merciless, exhausting work, but the reward can be great. On the Alberta prairie, Eilert is forced to cultivate an ever larger area to increase his wheat production, when prices start falling at the end of the war. And then Eilert’s large family is hit by an accident that turns everything upside Down.

The rebellious Gjertine comes to a crossroads in her life, and set out on a final, great journey to Ravenscrag in Saskatchewan. Back in Molde, Norway, her sister Serianna becomes another person because of the grief she feels after her husband’s death. She talks to the haymaker as if he were still alive.

A Land No One Has Seen is the third novel in the great saga of Knut Hansen Nesje and his family. With poetic power, Hoem animates the story of the adventurous people who travelled across the Atlantic to build a new society, and of the hard working people who chose to stay behind to survive in and improve the world that they already knew.