Hunger — Knut Hamsun

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Originally published in 1890, this classic of modern literature follows an impoverished Norwegian writer through the streets of Christiania (now Olso) as he struggles on the edge of starvation. Existing on what little money he makes from selling the occasional article to the local paper, and down to pawning the clothes on his back, the young writer slowly loses control of his reason and begins to slip increasingly into bouts of madness, paranoia, and despair.

A gripping portrait of an artist struggling for integrity, Hunger mirrors the dire straits of Hamsun's own life when he brought this, his then incomplete first novel, to a publisher in 1888.