Through a remarkably varied and productive authorship of novels, plays, and essays, Per Christian Jersild, who debuted in 1960 with a collection of short stories, became one of the major Swedish authors of the last half of the twentieth century. Several of his books, enthusiastically read by a large percentage of the Scandinavian reading public, became major commercial successes, an experience unusual in any country for authors of Jersild's intellectual depth and complexity. This combination of critical and popular recognition has made Jersild one of the few modern Swedish authors to be genuinely admired as both a popular and a serious writer. Remarkably, for the first twenty years of his literary career he was also a full-time physician who specialized in social and preventive medicine.

Jersild's writing reflects elements of both his creative imagination and his scientific interests and skills. Over the decades his novels have oscillated from highly...