Excerpt: "Presently the evenness of his breathing told her he was asleep. For a long time she lay on her back just as he had left her, mulling over her situation. In those brief minutes everything had supposedly righted itself. She had officially left her girlhood behind forever and become a woman. The days of wearing her hair down her back in a long braid were gone, although she was not yet entitled to wear a married woman's kerchief. Nor did she any longer belong to the group of young housemaids who had been her friends, nor to a group of married women whom she hardly knew. All at once she...

Judit Martin, originally from the American Midwest, has been living in rural Sweden since 1969. She has published several short stories in Scottish literary magazines, two books in Swedish, and one novel in English. These five short stories are historical fiction inspired by the lives of people Martin has known or known about. They depict life from a different era and the hardships that people of that time dealt with in day to day life. The stories take place in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Samuel tells the story of a tailor's son who marries a woman considered by her peers to...

-Kajsa- is the free-standing sequel to -Augusta's Daughter, - depicting peasant life in late-nineteenth century Sweden. It is the story of fifteen-year-old Elsa-Carolina's illegitimate daughter Kajsa, who was placed in a foster family immediately after birth. From there, at the age of eight, she was cast out into the world on her own. With the help of the women she met along the way, she survived and eventually gained control over her life. Her situation was by no means unique. Sweden has changed greatly since the nineteenth century, albeit in a different direction than America. In order to...