Nikolai's fortune

"They've erected statues to us now, both my mother and me.

Hers graces an old hayfield in a small Finnish village on the flat, pitiless plain that was Ostrobothnia's buttery.

Shaped in stone, a young woman stands prettily poised over her butter churn. "Dairy Maid" they call her - now. Mine overlooks the inner harbour of a sea-stained fishing town in Norway.

Bent over a barrel, head bound in a scarf, an old woman salts down the day's catch. "Herring Wife" they call me. I too have been called worse. Much, much worse. But that, of course, was long before lives such as ours became works of art." And so, Solveig Torvik introduces a heartbreaking, multigenerational epic that tells the tales of mothers and daughters, chronicling family secrets and sufferings against the backdrop of Scandinavian history and culture.

An engrossing story told by three formidable women in Finland, Norway, and Idaho, "Nikolai's Fortune" is a vivid portrait of immeasurable strength and unexpected discovery in the face of hardship.As a child, Torvik heard stories of a lost, mysterious great-grandfather who left Finland for America to make his fortune - leaving Torvik's great-grandmother and his unborn daughter behind.

As a reporter, Torvik determined to discover the fate of the man who followed his dreams to Oregon.

She uncovered not only the story of one man, but also the saga of an entire family.

In "Nikolai's Fortune", the journalist turns fact into fiction and shares the tales of her ancestors as she imagines they would have told them.

Grandmother, mother, and daughter each share their own story: Kaisa, of her mother's love for Nikolai and her own 500-mile trek at the age of twelve from impoverished Finland across the snowy mountains of Lapland; Berit, of child slavery and an obsession with seeking out her grandfather's fortune for her mother; and Hannah, of her childhood during the Nazi occupation of Norway and her family's emigration to Idaho.

Mothers and daughters face the anguish of famine, poverty, rape, illegitimate children, emigration, ethnic prejudice, and war, hiding shameful secrets that reach across three countries and four generations.Through detailed historical research into census, church, and weather records, as well as academic and museum sources, Torvik recaptures a dramatic story nearly lost to memory and inherits something worth more than a fortune in riches - a sense of her family history, ethnic background, and the generations of remarkable women who came before her.