“I tried to avoid the occult, but like it or not, I was attuned to the unearthly. Once, staying with a baron and baroness, I woke up screaming when a white shape floated toward me in the night. When I told my hosts, the couple exchanged a freighted look. They had chosen not to believe or to tell me that my bedroom was haunted.”

A wild imagination and its accompanying fears and secrets helped make Hans Christian Andersen one of the most famous writers of fairy tales ever. His attunement to the strange and unusual colors his every story and the many questions surrounding the kind of man he really was.

"FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY is a delightful novel...that revolves around [Hans Christian] Andersen’s prolonged stay with Charles Dickens and his family.... [T]he book plays their real-life relationship for laughs, horrors and flat-out insanity."

Inspired by actual events, FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY is a delightful novel from Francine Prose that revolves around Andersen’s prolonged stay with Charles Dickens and his family. The two men are odd housemates, and the book plays their real-life relationship for laughs, horrors and flat-out insanity.

In the summer of 1857, the British press warned that an approaching comet was going to destroy the earth. Dickens took his clan to his countryside home, Gad’s Hill, outside London for the summer. Under a clear sky, they hoped to enjoy a quiet and safe country escape. However, many years before, Dickens met a depressed Andersen at a dinner party and invited him to come to Gad’s Hill sometime.

The comet sends Andersen to seek unannounced refuge with the Dickenses. When he arrives, out of the blue, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, expect him to stay for five days or so. Instead, he sticks around for five weeks, affecting Dickens’ relationships with his loved ones in shattering ways. Catherine is miserable, having found out that a new actress in one of her husband's plays might be about to take her place in his heart. Andersen is untrained in social niceties, and his anxious, self-conscious oblivion leads to almost too many awful embarrassments to count. FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY is by turns a hilarious and insane look at how the crazier life is, the better the art one can create from it. But at what cost?

The book is split into three sections, giving three groups an opportunity to look at the guest who wouldn’t leave scenario --- the eight Dickens children, Dickens and Andersen. In our society, where everything goes, it is fascinating to see how the rigorous social mores of the day, even amongst free-wheeling and free-minded literary masters, prevented people from handling even the most obvious indiscretions for fear of being impolite. It is a message for the ages, even this one, that adherence to the latest social scriptures can often only ruin an otherwise good time.

FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY is a perfect summer tale. As people make plans for the upcoming season, the idea of an unannounced guest is a big fear. Prose, with her light and airy writing style, puts a centuries-old spotlight on what good can come from both the oblivion of one man and the attempt to bow to what another man deems so important. Ultimately, these two geniuses play out these indignities in a Noel Coward-esque social satire that, in Prose's capable hands, becomes an enlightened and enjoyable story for all readers, hosts and guests alike.