Short Synopsis
Scandinavians is a personal investigation, with award-winning author Robert Ferguson as the ideal companion as he explores wide-ranging topics such as the power and mystique of Scandinavian women, from the Valkyries to the Vikings; from Nora and Hedda to Garbo and Bergman.

Full Synopsis
Scandinavia is the epitome of cool: we fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system and their healthy outdoor lifestyle; we glut ourselves on their crime fiction; even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, commonsensical acceptance of life's vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider's view of Scandinavia, and how accurate is our picture of life in Scandinavia today?

Scandinavians follows a chronological progression across the Northern centuries: the Vendel era of Swedish prehistory; the age of the Vikings; the Christian conversions of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland; the unified Scandinavian state of the late Middle Ages; the sea-change of the Reformation; the kingdom of Denmark-Norway; King Gustav Adolphus and the age of Sweden’s greatness; the cultural golden age of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Munch; the impact of the Second World War; Scandinavia’s postwar social democratic nirvana; and the terror attacks of Anders Behring Breivik.

"Narrator Michael Page brings his full complement of language gifts to the task of narrating this wide-ranging audiobook." ---AudioFile

"Ferguson takes readers on a leisurely jaunt through the collective, interconnected histories of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. . . . combines the factual and the intimate." ---Publishers Weekly

“Scandinavians is essential reading.” ---Sir Richard Eyre, former director of the National Theatre, London

“There can be few outsiders who know as much about the Scandinavians as Robert Ferguson.” ---Liv Ullman

"A delightful history in which the author truly captures 'the soul of the North.'" ---Kirkus

"Delightfully free-roaming . . . [Scandinavians] offers . . . an engaging, layered look into a culture complex enough both to produce stylish rain gear and to embrace the foul weather that necessitates it." ---New York Times

Kirkus Bestseller

Kirkus Review