A Northern Light in Provence

Ilse Erland lives a solitary life in a sea captain’s ramshackle house on Greenland’s coast, and until recently, it has been the perfect life for her. Ilse is a literary translator, translating books from French to English. She takes her translations seriously, capturing the nuances of the language and finding the perfect phrase to match each colloquialism. Ilse is a literary and social oddity in her small hometown, but then she has the opportunity to explore the wider world. Ilsa travels to Provence, where she meets a famed national poet and begins to translate his works. When her translations meet the real world, she finds that she is forever changed. The differences between Ilse’s life in Greenland and her brief time in Provence couldn’t be starker. After returning to Greenland and losing her beloved seaside home to the ocean, she must decide where she belongs and where her heart truly resides. Gilli Messer narrates Birkelund’s (The Runaway Wife) characters with a clear voice, going from Danish to English to French believably.