Cobblestones is a freestanding sequel to the author’s great historical novel Sara, which centred on the life of Ålesund’s first midwife. For fifty years, from the 1860s until the outbreak of the First World War, we follow the marriages of a mother and her daughter in the next generation.
The story is set in Trondheim, where we are privy to the disparities and clashes between social classes in times of prosperity and slump. In the case of Sara and Jacob Mortensen, it is the husband who is to the fore in society; behind him, however, stands his wife, and it is through her eyes that we watch the story unfold.
With a strong sense of history and psychological insight, Toril Brekke dramatizes events and changes in middle-class family life of the period, and in so doing illuminates the roles played by women as mothers, teachers, daughters and aspiring brides.