Description
“Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy.”—Eileen Battersby, TLS
In a remote fishing village, a boy and his best friend spend the lonely hours on shore reading and talking about poetry. When the friend, absorbed in a borrowed copy of Paradise Lost, forgets his oilskin one morning and the crew is unexpectedly caught at sea in a savage winter storm, tragedy strikes. Overwhelmed by grief—and his crewmates’ indifference to what has happened—the boy leaves the village, determined to return the book to its owner. The hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence: he’s already resolved to join his friend in death. But when he reaches the town where he intends to end his days, he couldn’t have imagined the stories and lives he finds.
Navigating the depths of despair to celebrate the redemptive power of friendship, Heaven and Hell is an incandescent story of community, resilience, and love from one of Iceland’s most celebrated novelists.
Praise for Heaven and Hell
“A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place . . . Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he’s not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The novel is lyrical in detailing hardscrabble life along polar sea shores, where everyone has lost someone, yet the fishing boats keep launching . . . A poetic soul sets out on a quest to honor his lost friend in the aching, trilogy-opening novel Heaven and Hell.”
—Foreword Reviews
“[A] brief, elegiac novel . . . Written in dense, poetic prose, with more emphasis on mood than plot, this novel circles through the many ways of surviving in a harsh place.”
—Booklist
“With exquisite language, allegory, and an intense sense of place, the comparison to Cormac McCarthy is entirely appropriate.”
—Mary Wahlmeier Bracciano, The Raven Bookstore (Lawrence, KS)
“I’m still feeling the chills from Stefánsson’s description of cod fishing in a rowboat on the stormy open seas. An excellent author.”
—Todd Miller, Arcadia Books (Spring Green, WI)
Praise for Your Absence is Darkness
“Comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefánsson’s book, nor the uniqueness of his prose, rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton.”
—Daniel Mason, New York Times
“Stefansson uses the drama and comedy of everyday lives to dive into a broad range of topics: philosophy, music, faith, and even the science of earthworms.”
—New York Times
“Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mr. Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere . . . Questioning, vulnerable and openly sentimental, this is an absorbing commemoration of what the author calls the paradox that rules our existence, the vivifying joy and paralyzing sorrow of loving another person.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“I couldn’t put it down.”
—Washington Post
“What makes this so irresistible is the narrator’s constant optimism as he probes profound questions from within the murk of his consciousness (‘Give me darkness, and then I’ll know where the light is’). Stefánsson is poised to make his mark on the world stage.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
