“This book is the History of Danish Hopes, a story about what we feared, what we dreamed about, what we hoped for and what we expected in the 20th century, and I tried to tell it all as authentically and simply as possible...” This is the debut a novel by Peter Hoeg, in the future the famous author of “Smilla and her sense of snow”, “Silence” and “Conditionally Fit”, his brilliant entry into the major league of Scandinavian literature. Before the reader’s eyes, the century that is moving farther and farther from us will again pass - with all its cynicism and sentimentality, progress and prejudices, with the attempts of five generations of inhabitants of a single country to slow down or speed up the passage of Time. So, our “Imagination of the 20th Century” begins ... in 1520, in the Danish estate Dark Hill, where, according to Paracelsus , is the center of the Universe.