The Wonderful Adventures of Nils

Nils Holgersson is, at the start of the book, a genuinely unpleasant boy, one who takes real pleasure in tormenting the animals on his family's farm, and Lagerlöf punishes that cruelty directly: when Nils corners and torments a tomte, a small household spirit, the tomte shrinks him down to its own tiny size and leaves him that way. Before Nils can work out what to do next, the farm's white domestic gander, Mårten, decides to join a flock of wild geese passing overhead, and Nils, terrified of being left alone and helpless, grabs on and is carried off with them on their full migration the length of Sweden. What follows is less a single adventure than a long string of them, each one dropping Nils and the geese into a different province, each with its own landscape, industry, wildlife and folklore, since Lagerlöf originally wrote the book on commission from Sweden's national teachers association as a geography reader meant to teach schoolchildren their own country region by region. Nils spends the journey small, powerless and entirely dependent on creatures he once mistreated, and that dependence slowly remakes him: he begins protecting the flock rather than only being protected by it, risking himself for animals he would once have hurt without a thought. The tomte's condition for undoing the spell was always genuine change rather than time served, and by the time the geese complete their circuit and Nils returns home, transformed enough in character that the spell lifts and he is restored to his ordinary size, he is a boy his own family barely recognises for how much he has grown into someone worth being around.

Lagerlöf folds a real, carefully researched geography of Sweden into a fully imagined fairy tale without either side feeling like a chore, and the book suits a reader, young or old, drawn to a long journey story that teaches without ever feeling like a lesson.