Swede Hollow

An award-winning and best-selling epic family history and gritty depiction of the darker side of Swedish immigrant life in America

For the Klar family, America meant the dream of a better life—a dream that had come true for so many Swedish immigrants. But their arrival, just as a great fire devastates Ellis Island, portends something very different. Failing to find work and fearful for their children in the tenements of New York City, Gustaf and Anna make another desperate move--to the Midwest, where fellow immigrants have settled in a place they call Swede Hollow.

A cluster of shacks in a wooded ravine on the edge of St. Paul, Minnesota, Swede Hollow is home to immigrants who have largely been absent from the familiar stories of Swedish American history—a hard-luck lot brought vividly to life in Ola Larsmo's award-winning novel. Multiple characters intertwine with the Klars' struggle to scrape out an existence in a place that outsiders dismiss as an unsanitary slum. Following their tangled paths from New York to St. Paul to Duluth—and the infamous lynchings of 1922— Swede Hollow is at once an epic family history and an intimate depiction of the darker, more complicated experiences of Swedish immigration, echoing the larger challenges of immigration in the twentieth century and today.