Narrative Non-fiction · Hardback

A Year in the Woods

Norwegian title: Året i skogen

Torbjørn Ekelund

As a boy he used to dream of hazardous expeditions to unmapped regions. Thirty years later he came to understand that the dream would never come true. He did not have the guts. And besides, there were no unmapped regions left. But nature was still there. He decided to make his dreams real, just downscale it a bit. He packed his backpack and spent twelve lonesome nights in the woods, and the result is this book. A Year in the Woods is the antitheses of great expeditions. There is no hunger or famish, no dangerous predators, no fighting for life and death. But it is a book about seeing nature and about our idea of being outdoors. It is a book about the changing of the seasons, about finding the closer parts of nature and about how little it actually takes to experience an adventure. But first and foremost, it is a book about one man trying to find the way back to the forest where he spent so much time as a child. The era of great expeditions is over. Now is the time for micro expeditions.A refreshingly modest style with liberating little observations in an appealing low tempo about occasional escape from the daily grind.DAGBLADET

Thorbjørn Ekelund has written a little pearl of a book about twelve micro expeditions. It is incredibly inspiring to read about how a need to be outdoors has resulted in twelve nights under the stars, one in each of the years twelve months. Ekelund is a true inspiration to all of us who are in a time clinch and would want to spend more time out in nature.NRK