Peasant Students

A scholar's dream. The price of belonging.

Daniel Braut is a farmer's son who longs for a life beyond the fields. Education seems to promise everything: independence, respectability, a place among cultivated people, and a future in the ministry. But the journey from the countryside to Kristiania brings hunger, borrowed money, and a difficult education in the rules of social advancement.

As Daniel searches for security and acceptance, religious ideals meet material needs, and the desire to rise begins to change the person he hopes to become. With comedy, sympathy, and unsparing irony, Arne Garborg follows a young man caught between the world he comes from and the society he wants to enter.

First published in Norway in 1883 as Bondestudentar, Peasant Students explores ambition, class, faith, and the uneasy relationship between education and freedom.

This Unbound Atlas edition presents the complete novel in a newly prepared English translation from the Norwegian first edition, including all thirteen chapters, the author's final note, and explanatory notes on historical references, cultural terms, and foreign-language quotations.

How much of yourself would you trade for a place in the world?