Gunnar Kampen grows up in Iceland during the Second World War in a household fiercely opposed to Hitler and Nazism. At nineteen he seems set for a conventional, dutiful life. And yet in the spring of 1958, he founds a covert, anti-Semitic nationalist party, a cause that will take him on a clandestine mission to England from which he never returns.
Inspired by one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that was formed in Iceland in the 1950s, Sjon's portrait of an ardent fascist is as thought-provoking as it is disturbing. As this taut and fascinating novel suggests, the se... continue
From the "Icelandic Dickens (Irish Examiner)," a writer who "shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy" (Times Literary Supplement), comes this profound and playful masterwork of literature--winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize and longlisted for France's Prix Medicis Étrangere--that ponders the beauty and mystery of life and our deepest existential questions. In small places, life becomes bigger. Sometimes distance from the world's tumult can open our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to e... continue