ABOUT
THE BOOK

Idealistic, misguided Morten Falch is a newly ordained priest sailing to Greenland in 1787 to convert the Inuit to the Danish church. A rugged outpost battered by harsh winters, Sukkertoppen is overshadowed by the threat of dissent; natives from neighbouring villages have united to reject Danish rule and establish their own settlement atop Eternal Fjord. As Falck becomes involved with those in his care – his ambitious catechist, a lonely trader’s wife, and a fatalistic widow he comes to love – his faith and reputation are dangerously called into question.

Comments from the judges

An idealistic Norwegian called Falck Morten arrives in Copenhagen of the 1780s, hungry to know why, in the words of Rousseau, ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’. Though he is drawn to medicine, he chooses the missionary’s work and after a series of intellectual and sexual revelations, he boards a ship to pagan Greenland. Greenland: ‘the night that separated the evening when I retired to sleep cheerful and young, from the morn when I awoke a palsied old man.’ This sublimely written and stunningly imagined work is unlike any other historical novel. One of its achievements, conveyed in the masterful translation by Martin Aitken, is that its epic philosophical and narrative scope is held in prose that is intimate, contemporary, and wondrousy balanced between humour and poetry. Told through the inner life and dangerous adventures of Falck Morton and the dwellers of the fjords, this study of human desire, the tyranny of dogma, and the need to belong, is also a love-letter to a little-known land and a major contribution to the literature of place. Who can forget the dreams of the Greenland prophetess Maria Magdalene, or the scene where Falck sees a procession of the dead, including himself, crossing from one fjord to another? The uncanny world of Greenland’s wilderness and the people who belong there, as much as those who arrive to act out their fantasies, will stay with you for a very long time.