Torborg Nedreaas cemented her place in Norwegian literary history with a series of narratives describing the coming of age of Herdis Hauge, an artistically inclined, redheaded girl from Bergen. In these stories Nedreaas describes the world through the eyes of her young protagonist, offering a child's view of family life and the everyday environment in a port-city neighborhood. Few writers--if any--have captured the inner world of a child as fully and realistically. As Herdis's story progresses, Nedreaas describes her difficult growth into adolescence, exploring the struggles of a developing artist, a theme that appears in many of her writings.

Nedreaas has been praised as a master of short fiction, and her talents in this genre are not only evident in her short-story collections but also in her novellas and novels. For example, every chapter of the Herdis novels is composed as a short story, a fragment of the...