Will I love The Emigrants?

The first of Moberg’s 4-volume saga of Swedish immigrants, this book is so thoroughly researched that he invented a term, calling them “documentary novels.” The family in the story are farmers from a poor, remote parish in Sweden whose lives are constricted by both the church and the state. This reflects the painful realities of Europe in 1850, where almost everyone was poor, rural, oppressed, and completely unprepared for the journey ahead of them. Whether you read Moberg’s Emigrant Novels for the intense personal drama or for more understanding of why people leave their homelands, you will find these stories… show more.

This iconic Swedish emigrant epic was first published in 1949 but has been reprinted many times, and has also been made into film, most recently in 2021. The story involves a group of people from a poor farming village in southern Sweden who decide to leave for a better life in America. The main characters are Oscar and Kristina who with their children eventually settle in Minnesota. As an immigrant myself I can relate to Kristina, who unlike her husband never quite grows roots in the new country. When Kristina is on her deathbed Oscar asks if there is anything… show more.

If you like your historical fiction to have sweep, this is the series for you! Four novels that take their characters from Sweden to eastern Minnesota in the 1840s, through the Civil War, and onto the cusp of the modern age. Karl-Oscar and Kristina, their children, and their companions undergo incredible hardship as they make the journey and establish their new life in Taylors Falls. It’s the great American emigration story of struggle, achievement, and compromise, just as relevant today as ever. 

This is a series of four novels, based on the true story of the Swedish emigration to America in the 19th and early 20th century. It is a powerful tale of the hunger and oppression that forced them away, the physical and psychological cost of migration, and the promise of freedom in the new world. By condensing a million life stories into the staunch individualist Karl Oskar and his slightly more hesitant family and friends, Vilhelm Moberg did not just make history come alive, he also illustrated eternal truths about mankind and its struggle for progress.