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The third volume in the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s epic story of medieval Norway, finely capturing Undset’s fluid, natural style in the first English translation in nearly a century
 

In the early fourteenth century, Norway is a kingdom in political turmoil, struggling with opposing forces within its own borders and drawn into strife with neighboring Sweden and Denmark. Bloody family vendettas and conflicting loyalties sparked by the irrepressible passion of a boy and his foster sister (also his betrothed) have now set in motion a series of terrible consequences—with a legacy of betrayal, murder, and disgrace that will echo down through the generations. Crossroads, the third of Olav Audunssøn’s four volumes, finds Olav heartbroken by loss and further estranged from his son. To escape his grief, Olav leaves his home estate of Hestviken and agrees to serve as captain on a small merchant ship headed to London. There, separated from everything familiar to him, Olav begins a visionary journey that will send him far into the forest and deep into his soul. Questioning past decisions and future plans, Olav must grapple with his own perceptions of love and guilt, sin and penitence, vengeance and forgiveness. 

Set in a time and place where royalty and religion vie for power, and bloodlines and loyalties are law, Crossroads summons a powerful picture of Northern life in medieval times, as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize in 1928. Conveying both the intimate drama and epic sweep of Olav’s story as grief and guilt drive him to ever more desperate action, Crossroads is a moving and masterly re-creation of a vanished world tainted by bloodshed and haunted by sin and retribution. 

As with Kristin Lavransdatter, her earlier medieval epic, Undset immersed herself in the legal, religious, and historical documents of the time while writing Olav Audunssøn to create astoundingly authentic and compelling portraits of Norwegian life in the Middle Ages. And as in her translation of Kristin Lavransdatter, Tiina Nunnally does full justice to Undset’s natural, fluid prose, in a style that delicately and lyrically conveys the natural world, the complex culture, and the fraught emotional territory against which Olav’s story inexorably unfolds.

A broad and accessible history of religion in Texas, from prehistory to the present.

From sprawling megachurches to religious billboards and towering steel crosses, religion quite literally looms over Texas. Christian nationalism determines the state’s politics and, every school day, more than five million Texas children pledge allegiance to “one state under God.” But it wasn’t always this way.

In this wide-ranging chronicle, Joseph Locke uncovers the breadth of Texas’s religious history, from Indigenous painters of cosmological cave art and Spanish invaders who constructed missions to irreligious Anglo colonists, freethinking frontiersmen, Tejano folk saints, evangelical culture warriors, and Muslim immigrants. Locke traces the state’s religious transformations across the centuries, bringing them to life through his depiction of compelling figures, like enslaved preacher Anderson Edwards, fighting fundamentalist J. Frank Norris, and celebrated humanitarian Sister Norma Pimentel, and gripping moments, such as the murder of atheist newspaperman William Cowper Brann and the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Comprehensive, fast-paced, and highly readable, One State Under God reveals how the Lone Star State’s spiritual path was blazed.