Emperor of Portugallia

When Jan's daughter leaves for Stockholm and never writes, a poor farmer in the Swedish forest country does the only thing a devoted father can do: he invents an empire for her. In his mind, she becomes the Empress of Portugallia, and he her Emperor, ruling over a kingdom of birch trees and silver streams. For fifteen years, Jan lives entirely in this delusion, dressed in improvised royal regalia, claiming the place of honour in church and at village gatherings, questioning the social hierarchies that once defined him. Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, weaves a devastating portrait of love transformed into fantasy, and the quiet tragedy of a man who cannot accept that he has been forgotten. This is a story about the lies we tell ourselves to survive, the class divisions that persist even in imagination, and the terrible weight of waiting for someone who may never return. It endures because it captures something universal: the way grief can build its own cathedral, and we are all, in some sense, waiting for a letter that will never come.