Trial of Sören Qvist

Janet Lewis was a novelist, poet, and short-story writer whose literary career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. The New York Times has praised her novels as "some of the 20th century's most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature." Born and educated in Chicago, she lived in California for most of her adult life and taught at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Her works include The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946), and Poems Old and New (1982).Kevin Haworth's novel The Discontinuity of Small Things was winner of the Samuel Goldberg Prize for best Jewish fiction and finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Price. He teaches writing at Ohio University and serves as executive editor of Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.

The perfect novel of its genre. (New York Times) "Probably (The Trial of Sören Qvist) is the most perfect of Janet Lewis' novels, and among the most perfect of any novels." (Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction) A harmonious retelling of a seventeenth-century legend concerning a saintly pastor, his cherished daughter, and the villain who betrayed them…. Miss Lewis's artfully simple prose achieves the effect of an ancient, lovingly illuminated missal. (New Yorker) "Lewis has retold a true legend of Denmark in unadorned, free, and exciting prose. Here is a gruesomely fascinating story of such circumstantial evidence as to make the reader want to cry out in protest." (Saturday Review of Literature) "You know from the beginning what has happened– that a man has been executed for a murder no one in the small Danish community believes he committed. Yet circumstantial evidence points to him. By the end, he has convinced himself he is indeed guilty, and would rather die with a good conscience, forgiven by God, than struggle to live." (Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers) "I believe that there is nothing in my account of the Parson of Vejlby which might not have happened as I tell it. He is one of a great company of men and women who have preferred to lose their lives rather than accept a universe without plan or without meaning." "Intriguing … Janet Lewis combines scrupulous research and exquisite craftsmanship to create stories of timeless human drama … must rank among the finest historical fiction in English." (WDCB FM Radio, Chicago)