Doctor Glas

The haunting tale of Doctor Glas takes place in Stockholm during the closing years of the 1800s. A searing masterwork of Northern European literature.

A masterpiece of enduring power,Doctor Glasconfronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.With an introduction by Margaret Atwood.

Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-si cle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister's beautiful wife complains of her husband's oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder.

"Imagine the classic nineteenth-century drama featuring a tyrannical older man, his hapless daughter or young wife, and her caddish suitor, as in Balzac's Eugenie Grandet and Henry James's Washington Square, this time conjured up by a sensibility akin to Strindberg's and Ingmar Bergman's-and you begin to have an idea of the force and candor of this searing masterwork of Nothern European literature. The retrieval of Doctor Glas in English is a bracing gift to hungry readers."-Susan Sontag