Happy Times in Norway

Happy Times in Norway is a moving and delicately humorous picture of Undset’s own blissful home life before her nation fell to the Nazi occupation. Captured here is the excitement of a Norwegian Christmas, the Seventeenth of May, and summer in the idyllic mountains, as well as the chaotic adventure of raising two energetic boys. With vivid detail and illuminating descriptions of the landscape, Happy Times in Norway is infused with the wish that those cherished days could come again.

Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) was a prolific Norwegian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, and is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. From 1940 to 1945, she lived in the United States in exile because of the German occupation of Norway. She is best known for her epic medieval trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter.