Gosta Berling's Saga

Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and her novel, Gosta Berling's Saga, her best known work. The eponymous hero, a country pastor whose appetite for alcohol and indiscretions ends his career, falls in with a dozen vagrant Swedish cavaliers and enters into a power struggle with the richest woman in the province. This is one of the most charming and intriguing books that you will read in a long time. Not exactly a novel, rather a collection of (sometimes closely, sometimes loosely) linked short stories; you probably have never seen anything quite like it.