The Fjord - A Long Row Home

The Fjord - A Long Row Home

Sigri Sandberg

Original title: RO: om Sognefjorden og ein lang rotur heim
Publisher: Samlaget, 2022
Genre: Narrative non - fiction
Pages: 270 pages

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The Sognefjord is an elongated sea inlet banked by steep valley walls. The fjord was formed by glaciers over the course of millions of years.

Nature writer Sigri Sandberg is a restless mother of two who lives in several places. Her restlessness is compounded by death and illness in the lives of loved ones and upsetting reports about the state of the planet. She longs for peace of mind. She wonders about what home really is and what it means to belong somewhere.

Sandberg decides to row the Sognefjord, the more than 200 kilometers of the world’s longest navigable fjord, in an old wooden rowboat. She starts at the mouth of the fjord, in the area where she lived as a child, and rows inland, toward the farm where she now lives part-time.

Along the way she explains how the fjord was created, describes daily life back when the fjord was the main transport artery and elaborates on wind and currents, and life above and below the water surface. She rows with her husband, her girlfriends, and her mother – on different legs of the journey. She navigates waves and drama but also stretches of calm water and finds time for singing and skinny-dipping.
But if she manages to row the entire length of the fjord, will she find the peace of mind she is looking for?

The Fjord – A Long Row Home (Ro) is a beautiful story about Norway’s longest fjord – and an attempt to find home.

Foreign rights

Dutch: Uitgeverij Oevers
French: Les Éditions Dalva
German: Gräfe und Unzer

I have been reading – sitting in my favourite chair and accompanying you through rain and squalls and against the current, and through the silence of mirrorlike surfaces. I have felt powerful physical vitality and a sense of mastery, forgetting all about my own aging skeleton and flagging muscles. I have immersed myself in your reflections and delighted in your abilities as a writer. And I remain delighted by your determination, your honesty (which is at times startling) and your love. And then I think that you have everything required to row the length of the fjord and write your way into the meaning of belonging.Thank-you very much for a glorious fjord voyage, Sigri

Unn Spjelkavik, retired teacher

She describes ease and unease. In an apartment building in Oslo. On the swells of the Sognefjord. And in the depths of ourselves. Because when you row, you make waves. You are in harmony and disharmony with the elements and with yourself. So simple. So difficult

Yngve Kveine, Director of Communications, BI Norwegian Business School

Sigri Sandberg

Photo:Steinar Rorgemoen

For over twenty years, Sigri Sandberg has worked for various Norwegian media outlets. She spent several years living on the Arctic island of Svalbard and has written 15 books about nature, wilderness philosophy, climate, and polar regions. Sandberg has published 18 books to date. An Ode to Darkness (2019), narrative non-fiction on light pollution, has sold to 11 languages.

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An Ode to Darkness

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