The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

Morten Falck, idealistic and ill-prepared, turns down a quiet parish at home and sails to Greenland in 1787 as a priest of the Danish church. Sukkertoppen is a harsh outpost where the colonists and the colonised are drifting further apart, and deep in the country Christian Greenlanders have gathered around the prophets Habakuk and Maria Magdalena, who dream of freedom and equality four thousand kilometres from revolutionary Paris. Falck longs for home, becomes entangled with his parishioners, among them a catechist with ambitions of his own, the lonely wife of a trader and a widow with whom he falls in love, and has to choose between enforcing Danish authority and joining the Greenlanders' dream. The story moves between the colony and the Copenhagen of the 1790s.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

525 pages in the original

Genres

Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Greenland, Denmark, 1780s–1790s

First published

2012 by Gyldendal

Author's age

51 when first published

ISBN

9788702109023 (original)

9781782396673 (Atlantic Books, United Kingdom)

9780871406712 (Liveright, United States)

9780857897930 (Atlantic Books, United Kingdom)

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