AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE ICELANDIC LITERATURE PRIZE "The Icelandic Dickens" Irish Examiner "Stefansson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy" EILEEN BATTERSBY, T.L.S. Supplement "A wonderful, exceptional writer . . . A timeless storyteller" CARSTEN JENSEN "Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger" Sometimes a distance from the world´s tumult opens our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars. The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. With humour, with poetry, and with a tenderness for human weaknesses, Stefansson explores the question of why we live at all. Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton