Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset’s Nobel Prize-winning The Master of Hestviken could be the greatest work of Catholic literature you’ve never read. I can only insist you do read it, while utterly confident you won’t have any regrets.
Undset was a superbly catechised laywoman and a Third Order Dominican. Written following her (controversial) conversion to Catholicism in 1924, in The Master of Hestviken the author carefully interposes fragments of her quite genuine profound wisdom of the spiritual life, and the effects of sin and grace and the mysterious, throughout her saga. This makes her storytelling indelibly unique.
