In a Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. At once arrogant and unassuming, righteous and depraved, Nagel's bizarre behavior and feverish rants seduces the entire community even as he turns it on its head—before disappearing as suddenly as he had arrived.

Generally recognized as one of Knut Hamsun's greatest works, Victoria was originally published in 1898. The novel is a seemingly simple, touching idyll of young love. But its simplicity is deceptive, for the story is imbued with a passionate lyricism and that brooding melancholy that pervades much of Hamsun's writing. The star-crossed young lovers are Johannes, the miller's son, and Victoria, the daughter of the lord of the manor. Their moment of ecstasy is as brief and transitory as their desire, and they prove perversely cruel to each other. Born in 1859 in Norway, Knut Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly influential, landmark novel will also find a wide audience among lovers of books that probe the "unexplored crannies in the human soul" (George Egerton).