Nors, known primarily as a fiction writer, here embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark.

Who else could have done justice to this wild landscape, the stubborn psyche of its inhabitants, its brutal myths and its toxic industry?.

The resulting travelogue captures a side to Denmark that few will find familiar — the literal and figurative opposite of the country’s cosmopolitan capital, Copenhagen.

For readers whose knowledge of Denmark is confined to Copenhagen and its environs, Danish writer Dorthe Nors's A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast will come as a revelation. In 14 eloquent, observant essays that combine journalism, nature writing and memoir, Nors paints a vivid portrait of a remote and rugged territory whose striking scenery masks more than its share of dangers.

Nors brings Denmark’s western coast to life.

Sensitively translated.

In a thorough but unsystematic fashion, the writing encompasses the nature, history and provincial customs of this harsh and highly romanticized corner of the country...as she explores the area she sensitively sifts the ambiguities of belonging in the world and the condition of loving a place she knows will never love her equally in return.

Such frankness is as rare as it is refreshing in modern travel writing, a genre so vulnerable to the shallow and saccharine. Like the raw, elegant landscape she sets out to describe, Nors’ prose blends the delicate with the direct.

The book and its themes make me think of a tiny saffron salamander, the red eft, that lives on my land, and that creature’s deep sense of place.

... a masterpiece of place-based nonfiction with soothing, rhythmic sentences that mask the intrusive outside world like a white noise machine.

To envision the prose of this book as a scalpel—spare, glinting, cold but also warmed by the wielder’s hand—is apt.

... graceful, lyrical.

... poetic.