Unto a Good Land by Vilhelm Moberg

Unto a Good Land opens in the summer of 1850 as the sailing ship Charlotta unloads its human cargo - including Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their children, and a party of other emigrants from Smaland, a province in Sweden - in New York City. Their journey to a new home in Minnesota Territory takes them by river boat, steam wagon, Great Lakes steamship, and ox cart to Chisago County. There Karl Oskar and Kristina claim 160 acres and begin farming. It is a year of struggle, but the kindness of their new-found friends - both American and Swedish - helps temper the difficulties wrought by little cash, scant knowledge of English, and late-summer planting.

Paperback
372 pages
ISBN: 978-0-87351-320-3

About the author: Vilhelm Moberg, author of more than thirty novels, histories, and plays, is one of Sweden’s greatest writers of the twentieth century. Moberg’s most enduring works are his four Emigrant Novels, which portray the joys and tragedies of daily life for nineteenth-century Swedish pioneers in America.

Image description: The illustration on the cover has a purple-striped border around a crème-colored rectangle. At the top of that rectangle the author’s name is printed, with the title underneath. The subtitle is printed in white letters on a small red banner beneath that. Below that, the cover features a black-and-white illustration of gardening tools, buckets, an ax, and wood pieces.