Author(s): Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Novel | Iceland | Translated fiction | Fiction Reductions

"Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger"

Sometimes a distance from the noise of the world opens our hearts, our senses, our dreams. An intensity of feelings erupts from the life of a village of four hundred souls in the Icelandic countryside, where the infinite light of summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars. It becomes a microcosm of the eternal conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination.

The director who immerses himself in Latin and astronomy to the point of abandoning everything for the secrets of the universe, the greedy postman who reads every letter and then publicizes the villagers' private affairs, the lawyer who believes that the world is based on calculus, but then discovers that he cannot count the fish in the sea or his own tears.

With the enchantment of poetry, and full of humour and tenderness for human weaknesses, Stefánsson explores the question of why we live at all, and at the same time immerses us fully in the river of life.

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Review: Stefansson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendour. -- Boyd Tonkin * Spectator *
Stefansson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy -- Eileen Battersby * Times Literary Supplement *
Powerful and sparkling . . . Prize-winning translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing -- Irish Times * Nora O'Mahony *
A wonderful, exceptional writer . . . A timeless storyteller * Carsten Jensen *
The Icelandic Dickens . . . He has the same gift of writing with great understanding, an empathy with troubled souls and a skill at laugh-out-loud comedy -- Tina Neylon * Irish Examiner *

Author Biography: Jon Kalman Stefansson's novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature and his novel Summer Light, and then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy - Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize) - and for Fish Have No Feet (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017).