**The great Icelandic novel written by a Nobel prize-winner, this is a magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man's dogged struggle for independence.‘In Iceland it’s the canon, but to me it’s a cult classic’ Zadie Smith**‘I defy anyone to finish Halldór Laxness's Independent People without wetting the pages with tears’ Jonathan Franzen‘Favourite book? Independent People… I love it’ Ann Patchett

'Wildly original, morose, uproarious... It is also one of the funniest books ever written' Susan SontagA naive young man is sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate a small town that has reportedly lost its faith. The church is boarded up and the errant pastor lives with a woman who is not his wife. He has also allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. So the rumours go.What he discovers is a community that regards itself as the cen...

An intimate, magical novel about one enduring church in a rural Icelandic valley - an ode to a quiet way of life now lost to time foreverThe resting place of legendary Viking warrior Egil Skallagrímsson’s skull, Mosfell Church is a lonely, country church, fated to be destroyed. But as the plans to destroy it take shape, stories, myth and folklore abound in one magical last attempt to leave Mosfell standing.BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and capt...

“Drawing on historical events, including King Olaf’s reign in Norway and the burning of Chartres Cathedral, Laxness revises and renews the bloody sagas of Icelandic tradition, producing not just a spectacular historical novel but one of coal-dark humor and psychological depth.” – Publishers WeeklyFirst published in 1952, Halldór Laxness’s Wayward Heroes offers an unlikely representation of modern literature. A reworking of medieval Icelandic sagas...

Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is aone-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead.But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that...

*BY THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE*'Laxness at his best: a reminder of the mad hilarity of the Icelandic sensibility. An endearing and unforgettable voice' Nicholas ShakespeareAbandoned as a baby, Alfgrimur is content to spend his days as a fisherman living in the turf cottage outside Reykjavik with the elderly couple he calls grandmother and grandfather. There he shares the mid-loft with a motley bunch of eccentrics and philosophers who find r...

When the Americans make an offer to buy land in Iceland to build a NATO airbase after the Second World War, a storm of protest is provoked throughout the country. Narrated by a country girl from the north, the novel follows her experiences after she takes up employment as a maid in the house of her Member of Parliament. Her observations and experiences expose the bourgeois society of the south as rootless and shallow and in stark contrast to the age-old culture of the solid and less fancif...

From the Nobel Prize winner comes a captivating novel about an idealistic Icelandic farmer who journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise. • "Full of an earthy poetry...a style wonderfully wise and entirely Scandinavian in its combination of magic and reality." —The New York Times Book Review • With an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres.The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar o...

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppressed Danish colony, suffering under extreme poverty, famine, and plague. A farmer and accused cord-thief named Jon Hreggvidsson makes a bawdy joke about the Danish king and soon after finds himself a fugitive charged with the murder of the king’s hangman.In the years that follow, the hapless but resilient rogue Hreggvidsson becomes a pawn entangled in political and personal ...

A magnificently humane novel from the acclaimed Icelandic Nobel Prize winner: as an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation, the belief that one day he will be a great poet.The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet’s life ...

A new translation of Nobel Prize-winning author Halldór Laxness's masterpieceLate one snowy midwinter night, in a remote Icelandic fishing village, a penniless woman arrives by boat. She comes with her daughter, the young but gutsy Salka Valka. The two must forge a life in this remote place, where everyone is at the mercy of a single wealthy merchant, and where everything revolves around fish.After her mother's tragic death, Salka grows into a fiercely inde...

'A master class in motive and character' Alafair BurkeA taut psychological novel about trial by public opinion and how we shape the truth -- now available in English for the first timeIs she a victim or a murderer?Onizuka Kumako is a fierce woman: tall, beautiful, and not afraid to speak her mind. In Tokyo bars, she seduces customers and commits petty crime, using her connections to the local yakuza to get by. When she meet...