A man finds himself in a church somewhere in the Westfjords, not knowing how he got there, or why. It's as if he has lost all his bearings. When he discovers the inscription "Your absence is darkness" on a tomb in the village cemetery, a woman posing as the daughter of the deceased offers to take him to her sister who runs the only hotel in the area. The man then realizes that he is not just lost, but amnesiac: and yet everyone seems to know him. Little by little, different stories then unfold as if to restore his lost memory, plunging him into the extraordinary history of a family, from the middle of the 19th century until 2020. Mistakes, weaknesses and renunciations dominate the lives of these women and men as much as the quest for happiness. All are faced with the question of how to love, and all must make difficult choices. Your Absence Is Darkness is striking in its scale, its construction and its audacity: the number of characters, the span of time, the power of feelings, the violence of destinies - the stories are embedded in each other, forming an extraordinary mosaic, as if Stefánsson had wanted to reconstitute the lost memory not of a character, but of all of humanity. The result is incandescent.

Over 18 million copies sold worldwide. The bestselling Icelandic author of all time. 'One of the greats of modern crime fiction' Sunday Times __________________________________________ When a young woman known for drug smuggling goes missing, her elderly grandparents have no choice but to call the retired Detective Konrád. Still looking for his own father's murderer, Konrád agrees to investigate the case. But digging into the past reveals more than he set out to discover, and a strange connection to a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavík city pond decades ago recaptures everyone's attention. A brilliant, chilling tale of broken dreams and children who have nowhere to turn. __________________________________ 'The undisputed king of the Icelandic thriller' Guardian 'An international literary phenomenon - and it's easy to see why. His novels are gripping, authentic, haunting and lyrical' Harlan Coben

Over 18 million copies sold worldwide. The bestselling Icelandic author of all time. 'One of the greats of modern crime fiction' Sunday Times __________________________________________ When a young woman known for drug smuggling goes missing, her elderly grandparents have no choice but to call the retired Detective Konrád. Still looking for his own father's murderer, Konrád agrees to investigate the case. But digging into the past reveals more than he set out to discover, and a strange connection to a little girl who drowned in the Reykjavík city pond decades ago recaptures everyone's attention. A brilliant, chilling tale of broken dreams and children who have nowhere to turn. __________________________________ 'The undisputed king of the Icelandic thriller' Guardian 'An international literary phenomenon - and it's easy to see why. His novels are gripping, authentic, haunting and lyrical' Harlan Coben

In a remote part of Iceland, a boy and his friend Bardur join a boat to fish for cod. A winter storm surprises them out at sea and Bardur, who has forgotten his waterproof as he was too absorbed in 'Paradise Lost', succumbs to the ferocious cold and dies. Appalled by the death and by the fishermen's callous ability to set about gutting the fatal catch, the boy leaves the village, intending to return the book to its owner. The extreme hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence to him - he has already resolved to join his friend in death. But once in the town he immerses himself in the stories and lives of its inhabitants, and decides that he cannot be with his friend just yet. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Heaven and Hell is a perfectly formed, vivid and timeless story, lyrical in style, and as intense a reading experience as the forces of the Icelandic landscape themselves. An outstandingly moving novel.

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

It is three weeks since the boy came to town, carrying a book of poetry to return to the old sea captain - the poetry that did for his friend Bardur. Three weeks, but already Bardur's ghost has faded. Snow falls so heavily that it binds heaven and earth together. As the villagers gather in the inn to drink schnapps and coffee while the boy reads to them from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Jens the postman stumbles in half dead, having almost frozen to his horse. On his next journey to the wide open fjords he is accompanied by the boy, and both must risk their lives for each other, and for an unusual item of mail. The Sorrow of Angels is a timeless literary masterpiece; in extraordinarily powerful language it brings the struggle between man and nature tangibly to life. It is the second novel in Stefansson's epic and elemental trilogy, though all can be read independently.

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 Keflavik: a town that may be the darkest place in Iceland, surrounded by black lava fields, hemmed in by a sea that may not be fished, and site of the U.S. military base, whose influences shaped Icelandic culture from the '50s to the dawning of the new millennium. Ari - a writer and publisher - lands back in Keflavik from Copenhagen. His father is dying, and he is flooded by memories of his youth in the '70s and '80s, listening to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, raiding American supply lorries and discovering girls. And one girl he could never forget. Layered through Ari's story is that of his grandparents in a village on the eastern coast, a world away from modern Keflavik. For his grandfather Oddur, life at sea was a destiny; for Margret its elemental power brings only loneliness and fear. Both the story of a singular family and an epic that sparkles with love, pain and lifelong desire - with all of human life - Fish have no Feet is a novel of profound beauty and wisdom by a major international writer. By the author of the acclaimed trilogy, Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels and The Heart of Man.

After coming through the blizzard that almost cost them everything, Jens and the boy are far from home, in a fishing community at the edge of the world. Taken in by the village doctor, the boy once again has the sense of being brought back from the grave. But this is a strange place, with otherworldly inhabitants, including flame-haired Alfheidur, who makes him wonder whether it is possible to love two women at once; he had believed his heart was lost to Ragnheidur, the daughter of the wealthy merchant in the village to which he must now inexorably return. Set in the awe-inspiring wilderness of the extreme north, The Heart of Man is a profound exploration of life, love and desire, written with a sublime simplicity. In this conclusion to an audacious trilogy, Stefansson brings a poet's eye and a philosopher's insight to a tale worthy of the sagasmiths of old.

The third crime novel from international bestseller Yrsa Sigurdardottir, ASHES TO DUST is tense, taut and terrifying - not to be missed for fans of Nordic Noir. Thora peered at the floor, but couldn't see anything that could have frightened Markus that much, only three mounds of dust. She moved the light of her torch over them. It took her some time to realize what she was seeing-- and then it was all she could do not to let the torch slip from her hand. 'Good God,' she said. She ran the light over the three faces, one after another. Sunken cheeks, empty eye-sockets, gaping mouths; they reminded her of photographs of mummies she'd once seen in National Geographic. 'Who are these people?' 'I don't know,' said Markus . . . Bodies are discovered in one of the excavated houses at a volcanic tourist attraction dubbed 'The Pompeii of the North'. Markus Magnusson, who was only a teenager when the volcano erupted, falls under suspicion and hires attorney Thora Gudmundsdottir to defend him - but when his childhood sweetheart is murdered his case starts to look more difficult, and the locals seem oddly reluctant to back him up . . .

A chilling new case for Thora Gudmundsdottir, from Iceland's answer to Stieg Larsson. When all contact is lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely populated area on the northeast coast of Greenland, Thora is hired to investigate. Is there any connection with the woman who vanished from the site some months earlier? Why are the locals so hostile? And could one of the team staying at the site with Thora be responsible for the disappearances? Already an international bestseller, this fourth book to feature Thora Gudmundsdottir ('a delight' - Guardian) is chilling, unsettling and compulsively readable.

A new translation of Nobel Prize-winning author Halldor Laxness's masterpiece Late 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 independent-minded adult - cutting off her hair, educating herself and becoming an advocate for the town's working class. A coming-of-age story, a feminist tale, a lament for Iceland's poor - this is the funny, tender, epic story of Salka Valka. 'Laxness is a poet who writes to the edges of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot' Daily Telegraph TRANSLATED BY PHILIP ROUGHTON

A creepy, compelling thriller, SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME is the fifth Thora Gudmundsdottir novel from Yrsa, 'Iceland's answer to Stieg Larsson' (Daily Telegraph). A young man with Down's Syndrome has been convicted of burning down his care home and killing five people, but a fellow inmate at his secure psychiatric unit has hired Thora to prove Jakob is innocent. If he didn't do it, who did? And how is the multiple murder connected to the death of Magga, killed in a hit and run on her way to babysit?

The Great Weaver from Kashmir is Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness' first major novel, the book that propelled Icelandic literature into the modern world. Shortly after World War One, Steinn Ellioi, a young philosopher-poet dandy, leaves the physical and cultural confines of Iceland's shores for mainland Europe, seeking to become "the most perfect man on earth." His journey leads us through a huge range of moral, philosophical, religious, political, and social realms, from hedonism to socialism to aestheticism to Benedictine monasticism, exploring, as Laxness puts it, "the far-ranging variety in the life of a soul, with the swings on a pendulum oscillating between angel and devil." Upon his return to Iceland, Steinn finds himself more conflicted than before, torn between love of the beauty and traditions of his homeland, longing and regret for his great adolescent love, Dilja, and his newfound monastic ideal, forcing him to make choices with fateful consequences. The Great Weaver from Kashmir is as much a domestic parlor drama as it is a novel of ideas; it can be seen as the downward spiral of an antihero or an exploration of idealism and loss; it is at once an inward-looking and daring early novel and a modern epic spun by a superior craftsman. Published when Laxness was only twenty-five years old, The Great Weaver from Kashmir's radical experimentation created a stir in Iceland. Appearing in English now for the first time, The Great Weaver is much more than a first major work by a literary master--it is a remarkable modernist classic written literally on the cultural and geographical fringes of modern Europe.