Norway by Claudia Martin is a gorgeous photo collection that presents the country’s geography, history, and culture in an enticing way. It's broken down into four sections: Glaciers and Fjords, The Islands, Provinces and Towns, and Oslo. The photographs and maps help to illustrate the country’s beauty and diversity. Norway is an excellent introduction to the country's history and culture. It is an enjoyable and educational read that would be a great addition to any library.

***Many thanks to the Netgalley & Amber Publishing for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. ( )

Having recently read a few Norwegian novels, I’d grown curious about the land their authors had sprung from and was delighted to have my request for a digital copy of this book approved by Net Galley. This is a beautiful text, likely best appreciated as a coffee-table volume. There are some stunning photographs of natural wonders—particularly of the many deep fjords that extend the country’s coastline to 29,000 km/18,000 miles, making it the longest in Europe—as well as fine ocean views of several traditional towns and sea-facing sections of cities. Included, too, are photos of flora and fauna; statues, monuments, museums, buildings of historical, cultural, and architectural significance; fish markets and the fishing industry. Oslo gets its own chapter, with its distinctive neighbourhoods well represented. Unfortunately, a few of the images appeared quite dark on my iPad.

In reading this, I had hoped to gain a better sense of Norway’s counties and regions, but I only managed to do so by performing my own online map searches to connect names with their locations. Why the author/editor Claudia Martin didn’t include a single map is beyond me. Another problem is that a few counties/jurisdictions had their boundaries adjusted in January 2020. For example, two former counties—Hordaland and Sogne og Fjordane— were merged to form Vestland (which is centred around Norway’s second largest city, Bergen, in the southwest). Likewise, at the beginning of the current decade, Finnmark was merged with the neighbouring county of Troms to form the new, most northerly county, Troms og Finnmark. However, Martin confusingly uses only the older county names throughout this book, which is apparently a reissue (without appropriate updates) of the 2020 edition.

There is some specialized vocabulary, as well: “vernacular” to describe architecture (I’d only ever heard or used the word in relation to language); “orthogonal” to describe a right-angled street layout; “staved” medieval churches, built of upright wooden planks; and “koine,” a common language that arises naturally when two languages or dialects mix.

I’ll leave off with a few interesting facts gleaned from this informative text

• Norway has 1600 glaciers. (By comparison, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, Canada has 267 named glaciers. If we exclude the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, however, Canada has more glacier cover than any other nation on Earth—roughly 200,000 square kilometres.)
• Most fjords are deeper than the coastal sea into which they empty. (Lysefjord, for example, is up to 30 times as deep as the water at the sea end.) Fjords have shallow “sills,” underwater ridges, at their mouths, which made from the collected debris of the grinding glaciers that formed them.
• The centre the tiny village of Ulvik, situated at the end of a sidearm of Hardangerfjord, a major fjord in Vestland, was burned by the Germans in 1940, in retaliation against Norwegian resistance fighters. (If I ever knew that German warships had used the fjords to penetrate the interior of the country, I’d completely forgotten.)
• There are approximately 55,000 islands off Norway’s coastline, most of which are columns of rock, “stacks,” populated only by seabirds.
• Norway has sovereignty over the Svalbard Archipelago, 930 km/580 miles north of Tromsø, well north of the Arctic Circle. The world’s most northerly town, Longyearbyen (named for an American mining magnate), is found on the largest island, Spitsbergen. The town has a permanent population of 2100, of which 60% are male. There are very few people over 65 there. In fact, a person is only allowed to live there if he’s employed in the place—mining dominates—or if he’s independently wealthy.
• The abandoned Russian ghost settlement of Pyramiden is also found on Spitsbergen. The Russians extracted coal in the area from 1910 to 1998. When they left, they left behind their statue of Lenin. Tourism to this site is now being encouraged! Yes, really. The hotel has been cleaned up and reopened.

Overall, I found this book visually pleasing and informative, but there are some problems with it. Recommended with a few reservations. ( )

Norway: Land of Fjords and the Northern Lights by Claudia Martin is an excellent introduction to Norway for those who haven't been and a great reminder of its beauty for those who have.

I spent some time the past couple of days reading several coffee table books. I use them as decoration but with an eye toward being conversation starters. So while attractiveness is important, for me, the information offered is just as important. I usually want a nice mix of illustrations and either good captions or short sections of text that only refer to one or two pictures. In other words, I want to put the pictures and the information together easily, unlike, say, a history book that may have a number of illustrations but they may not even be on the same page as the part of the chapter that refers to them. So…

This book, like many of Amber Books' titles, is set up perfect for my taste. A brief introduction for each chapter about the region covered, then informative captions for each photograph telling the reader what they are looking at as well as some background. How some of the land and/or ice formations came to be, how they are changing, and why they look as they do are some examples of what we learn. Plus just seeing some of the photographs makes you feel you're there.

I would definitely recommend this for those with an interest in Norway as well as those who simply enjoy nice photography. As for gift giving, I think coffee table books make wonderful gifts, but I usually pick books on topics I know the person likes rather than guessing whether they might be interested. I don’t want them to feel like they have to set a book out because I might be dropping by. For the right person, this would make an excellent gift.

Some of the books in the Visual Explorer Guide series are smaller, roughly the size of the old large postcards one bought on vacation. I like those as end table, rather than coffee table, books. This one, however, is full size, roughly the size of standard printer paper (11”x8.5”).

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )