Children of the Age
Knut Hamsun
March 16, 2020
ISBN 9780578645704 / Paperback / 300 pages / $14.99

The first-ever new edition of J. S. Scott's 1924 English translation of Children of the Age (Børn av Tiden), the 1913 novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Knut Hamsun. A major commercial success in Norway, the book was praised on its release by Isaac Anderson, in The Literary Digest International Book Review (1924) as "Hamsun’s art at its best."

Hamsun described Children of the Age as "a novel about the war between the aristocrat and the peasant." The Encyclopedia of the Novel (2014) called it "a historically based—and utterly scathing—critique of modernity." And the Hamsun Centre (Hamsunsenteret) website wrote: "In Children of the Age a family's rise and fall are used to describe the decline and fall of a whole epoch. Thematically the novel has similarities to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901), with Hamsun's humour being the stylistic difference between the two."

Set on the semi-feudal estate of Segelfoss in northern Norway, the novel chronicles the decline of Lieutenant Willatz Holmsen and his family as aristocratic authority collides with the rise of industrial capitalism. Both a family saga and a sweeping critique of modernity, Children of the Age traces the fall of a social order with irony, psychological depth, and dark humor, securing its place among Hamsun's essential works.