Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! On January 14, we’ll be discussing award-winning Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Your Absence Is Darkness, a spellbinding saga about the inhabitants of a rural community on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, out now in translation by Philip Roughton.

A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices,  each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.

Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time.

“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).

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