Nils Holgersson is not, at first, a boy anyone would choose as a hero. He pulls cats by their tails, trips his mother while she carries the milk pail, and thinks nothing of the harm he causes. Then one day he finds himself magically transformed into a tiny imp — and everything changes. Clambering onto the back of a gander, he is swept into the sky with a flock of wild geese on a journey across all of Sweden: over patchwork fields, through storms, past castles and lakes, and even to a city hidden beneath the sea. ‘Never before had Nils travelled around at such good speed, and he had always liked riding fast and wild … Nor had he thought what it might be like to travel so high above the ground. But it was like flying away from worries and sorrows and annoyances of every imaginable kind.’ As he soars above the world he once barely noticed, Nils learns what it truly means to care for living things, in Selma Lagerloef’s timeless and beloved fable. The Guardian called it: ‘grand, beautiful, exciting and poignant … full of poetical phrasing … yet allows for the naughty spirit of childhood to remain true.’
ISBN 13: 9780241206096
Author: Selma Lagerlof
