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Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night

On sale

5th March 2020

Price: £14.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780857059758

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AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE ICELANDIC LITERATURE PRIZE

“The Icelandic Dickens” Irish Examiner

“Stefánsson 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, Stefánsson explores the question of why we live at all.

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Reviews

Boyd Tonkin, Spectator
Stefánsson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendour.
Eileen Battersby, Times Literary Supplement
Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy
Irish Times, Nora O'Mahony
Powerful and sparkling . . . Prize-winning translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing
Carsten Jensen
A wonderful, exceptional writer . . . A timeless storyteller
Tina Neylon, Irish Examiner
The Icelandic Dickens . . . He has the same gift of writing with great understanding, an empathy with troubled souls and a skill at laugh-out-loud comedy