Sara Lidman is a writer with a dual reputation. On the one hand, she is a distinguished novelist and best-selling author, acknowledged by critics as stylistically innovative and as one of the most significant Swedish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Lidman's many years of political activism, beginning in Africa in the early 1960s but especially during the Vietnam War, have earned her a reputation as an articulate and always independent public voice addressing the crucial social, political, and environmental issues of her time. In her writing Lidman employs a distinctive blend of poetry and prose, deeply anchored in the oral tradition of her native northern Sweden. Her first novel, Tjärdalen (The Tar Mine, 1953), was an unparalleled success both with critics and the public, but she later abandoned the writing of fiction altogether for more than a decade, only...