First published in 1926, ALBERTA AND JACOB is a partly autobiographical depiction of a young woman's rebellion against the narrow values and repressed barbarity of a struggling Protestant bourgeoise at the turn of the nineteenth century. Alberta is the adolescent daughter of a bullying magistrate and his neurotic wife who have been driven by past crimes of extravagance to a small, snowbound town in the extreme north of Norway, within the Arctic circle. Together with her more extroverted brother Jacob, Alberta finds herself increasingly in revolt against their parent's shabby gentility and the suffocating provincialism of their surroundings. Imaginative and intelligent, she craves for worldly knowledge and a more purposeful life, but her way forward is blocked a crippling sense of her own inadequacy, insignificance and guilt. The arrival of summer visitors, with their challenging conversation and self-possession, the first troubling intimations of sexuality and the departure of her adored brother for the life of a sailor, introduce a new urgency to Alberta's painful, almost abnormal sensitivities.
In brilliantly recreating both the physical immediacy of a bitterly cold town in a remote place and the social reality of the rigidly confined society, this delicate sketch of adolescence also subtly describes effects of climate on the human heart. The first novel in an acclaimed trilogy, ALBERTA AND JACOB remains today one of the most outstanding examples of Norwegian fiction.