In the Library
Growth of the Soil
Knut Hamsun, 1917
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by W. W. Worster
- Chapters
- Chapters 31
- Length
- Length 138k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest—who trod it into being first of all?
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
About the book
No road leads to the high, empty land where Isak arrives with an axe and a sack of tools, and where he raises first a turf roof, then tree by tree, stone by stone, a farm that had not existed before he came. Inger joins him, harelipped and startled that anyone would want her, and together they clear ground, birth calves, and build a household from nothing but labor and season. Knut Hamsun writes the oldest miracle there is: a family made not from love declared but from work repeated until a wilderness answers to a name. He does not spare the cost. When their third child is born with Inger's own harelip, she smothers the infant rather than let her grow up marked the way she herself had been, and is tried and sent away for years, though the farm does not pause even for that. Money arrives later, a mine, a boom, a son pulled to town and ruined by it, but the field keeps yielding all the same, indifferent to what its people have survived.