Join one of Scandinavia’s best-loved storytellers, Lars Mytting in conversation with writer and editor Catherine Taylor about his brilliant new novel, The Bell in the Lake. The first in a rich historical trilogy that draws on legend, The Bell in the Lake is a beautiful, heart-breaking romance set in the wilds of northern Norway. Lars' previous novel, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme has been a recent favourite for Dulwich Books staff and customers.

Lars Mytting is the author of the international bestseller, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. His fictional debut novel, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, received the Norwegian National Booksellers’ Award and has been optioned for film. The Bell in the Lake was a No.1 Bestseller in Norway and has been translated into English by Deborah Dawkin.

Catherine Taylor is the former deputy director of English PEN, a writer and editor, and critic for the Guardian, FT Life and Arts, New Statesman, The Economist and the TLS. She is commercial director of the not-for-profit culture quarterly the Brixton Review of Books and has judged several literary prizes, most recently the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation 2019.

With thanks to the Norwegian Embassy and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union for their support.

About The Bell in the Lake:

Norway, 1880. Astrid dreams of a life beyond marriage, children, and working the land to the end of her days. The young pastor Kai Schweigaard comes into her life when he takes over the small parish of Butangen, with its 700-year-old stave church and its legendary bells whose history is tied to Astrid’s ancestors. It is said that the bells ring when danger is imminent.

But Pastor Schweigaard wants to tear down the church and invites talented architecture student Gerhard Schönauer from Dresden to oversee the removal of the church and its reconstruction in the German city. Astrid is determined that the bells must stay in her village. Then Astrid falls in love with Gerhard. He is so different from the young men in Butangen: modern, cosmopolitan, elegant. She must make a choice: for her homeland and the pastor, or for an uncertain future in Germany. Then the bells begin to ring…

Lars Mytting: The Bell in the Lake