7 h 13 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 7 h 13 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does love cost when marriage belongs to the family, and freedom means risking your place within it?
In Noble Game, Elisabeth Kuylenstierna-Wenster explores arranged marriage, forbidden love and the price of choosing for yourself. The Swedish novel turns toward a world shaped by family duty and social rank, where marriage is more than a private promise. Money, property and reputation weigh against feeling, and the wishes of the heart meet the demands of the household.
At its centre is a question with no comfortable answer: what do you owe your family, and what do you owe yourself? Love that does not fit the rules puts those loyalties under pressure. Freedom carries its own cost, too. Choosing your own path can mean risking security, approval or the place you hold among those closest to you.
What you’ll discover
- Marriage as a bargain Consider what happens when money, rank and reputation carry more weight than personal feeling.
- Love against the rules Explore the strain of feelings that challenge the boundaries a household sets.
- The weight of family Face the pull between loyalty to others and the wish to choose for yourself.
- Freedom with a cost Weigh the value of independence against the security and approval it may threaten.
- Women within social limits Reflect on lives shaped by expectations about marriage, family duty and social position.
Who will love it
You will love this book if you enjoy Scandinavian family sagas, old houses with secrets, strong-minded heroines, and romances where money, duty and passion pull apart.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A future chosen by others
- An old love directs young lives
- The wedding narrows Gunvor's freedom
- Marriage turns wealth into dependence
- Being understood awakens new questions
- Gunvor speaks her wish for freedom
- Freedom carries duties of its own
- Rank gives love a price
- Good intentions can do harm
Who’s who
- Gunvor EidenA rich merchant's granddaughter, warm and trusting, who longs for happiness and finds she must fight for her own life.
- Margareta EidenGunvor's stern grandmother, who has kept faith with a lost love for fifty years and plans her granddaughter's marriage to save his name.
- Haqvin BrageThe young count of Bragehall, soft, vain and sleepy, who wants a rich wife and a comfortable life.
- Eric GyldenloThe charming, penniless Mad Count, a poet and adventurer who cannot resist beauty or settle anywhere.
- Count Haqvin the elderThe dying master of Bragehall, Margareta's first love, who wants his proud name to live on.
- Miss Beat-SofiThe Eiden housekeeper with gypsy blood, who tells fortunes with cards and loves Gunvor like a daughter.
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- Hardcover
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- Large print hardcover
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Noble Game in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Noble Game
by Elisabeth Kuylenstierna-Wenster
A rich girl rides to a crumbling Swedish castle where her grandmother has chosen her husband and a sealed room waits.
Medium level2–5 hours to read2 languages
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In short
What would you do if your grandmother asked you to marry a stranger so that an old castle could survive? That is where Noble Game begins, on a damp October train ride in southern Sweden, with eighteen-year-old Gunvor Eiden and a seventy-year-old woman who hides a secret.
Noble Game at a glance
- Reading time
- About 4 h 45 min3 h 45 min fast, 5 h 40 min slow
- Length
- 67,900 words
- Library level
- Medium longer sentences, everyday words
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A Grandmother Brings Gunvor to Bragehall
Gunvor Eiden, eighteen and orphaned, travels by train in October with her grandmother, Margareta Eiden, toward the old castle of Bragehall. The dying count wishes to see them. On the journey Gunvor learns that her grandmother hopes to make her the young count's bride.
Gunvor is the heiress of Eiden and Company, a firm founded by a peddler from Savoy who sold plaster figures. She grew up with strict governesses and a grandmother whose word is law. She longs for happiness without knowing what it looks like.
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- 15-minute summary
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Details
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 4 h 40 min
- Level
- Medium level
Cite this edition
Kuylenstierna-Wenster, Elisabeth. Noble Game. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/noble-game.
Kuylenstierna-Wenster, E. (2026). Noble game. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/noble-game
Kuylenstierna-Wenster, Elisabeth. Noble Game. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/noble-game.
@book{kuylenstiernawenster2026noble,
author = {Kuylenstierna-Wenster, Elisabeth},
title = {Noble Game},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/noble-game}
}
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What is Noble Game about?
It follows Gunvor Eiden, a rich merchant's granddaughter, who is married into the old Brage family of Skåne by her grandmother. She then struggles between duty to her family and her longing for freedom and love.
What does the motto Fac et nihil spera mean?
It is Latin for act, and hope for nothing. It is the Brage family motto carved above the castle gate, and Gunvor and her grandmother each interpret it differently as the story goes on.
Who is the gray man in Noble Game?
The gray man is a legend of a ghost said to haunt the sealed room at Bragehall. The story shows how superstition, prank and prophecy mix in the minds of the servants and the young people.
The author
Elisabeth Kuylenstierna-Wenster
1869–1933 · Swedish writer and translator
Elisabeth Kuylenstierna-Wenster was a Swedish writer and translator who lived from 1869 to 1933. She lived and worked in Sweden. She wrote fiction and translated books into Swedish. Her career took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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