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Bindingsbø: A Novel
March 1699. On a sandbar in a Norwegian valley, the executioner's sword twice refuses to bite the neck of Knut Trefall, a farmer who killed a merchant over a famine-year debt. Hidden in the alders, his twelve-year-old son watches and does not look away. His father has left him one The farm is still there.
For five generations the story travels in secret, in two halves, through widows, hired men and second sons. When Anders Haldorsen is six, his mother walks him past the sandbar and tells him her half. His father keeps the other half until the night before Anders leaves the valley for America in 1875.
On the Dakota prairie a hurried county clerk renames him Andrew H. Bim. He breaks sod, builds wagons, and survives the Hard Winter and the Children's Blizzard. Then he meets Elisa, a fisherman's daughter from the island of Manger who reads the wind the way her blind grandfather read the sea, and who has promised to bring her brother over on her own money.
Drawn from the documented history of one family line, from a 1645 tax list to a 1924 death certificate, Bindingsbø is a quiet, unsparing saga of work, weather and inheritance. It asks what a family hands down when the land does not go with it.
For five generations the story travels in secret, in two halves, through widows, hired men and second sons. When Anders Haldorsen is six, his mother walks him past the sandbar and tells him her half. His father keeps the other half until the night before Anders leaves the valley for America in 1875.
On the Dakota prairie a hurried county clerk renames him Andrew H. Bim. He breaks sod, builds wagons, and survives the Hard Winter and the Children's Blizzard. Then he meets Elisa, a fisherman's daughter from the island of Manger who reads the wind the way her blind grandfather read the sea, and who has promised to bring her brother over on her own money.
Drawn from the documented history of one family line, from a 1645 tax list to a 1924 death certificate, Bindingsbø is a quiet, unsparing saga of work, weather and inheritance. It asks what a family hands down when the land does not go with it.
323 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 3, 2026
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