Synopses & Reviews
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a church in rural Iceland, not knowing why he's there or how he arrived. When a local woman offers to reunite him with her sister, he realizes he's lost not only his bearings, but his memory as well: he doesn't recall either sister, nor their mother, the woman buried beneath the stone. As their stories unfold, he's plunged into a history spanning centuries and lives: a city girl drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze; a pastor who writes to dead poets and falls in love with a stranger from afar; a woman who must abandon her son to save her family; a musician plagued by cosmic loneliness; and an alcoholic transfixed by the night sky. Faced with the violence of destiny and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between lives, each discovers the cost of happiness and must answer the difficult question of how to love and be loved.
An incandescent romance about the misfortune of mortality and the strange salve of time, Your Absence is Darkness is a spellbinding story of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
Review
“During a time when no one can tell how things are going to turn out in this vast, dark world, Jón Kalman Stefánsson offers heart-wrenching wisdom, which purifies without placating.” Politiken (Denmark)
Review
“Stefansson has created a masterpiece with this new novel. You don’t want it to end.” NDR Kultur (Germany)
Review
“Incontestably this winter’s most beautiful title... Once again Stefánsson proves his exceptional talent.” Livres Hebdo (France)
Review
“Jón Kalman Stefánsson is a poet... Your Absence Is Darkness is poetic and beautiful and so full of love and grief that it leaves no one untouched.” Morgunblaðið (Iceland)
About the Author
Jón Kalman Stefánsson's novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. His books include Heaven and Hell; The Sorrow of Angels, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; The Heart of Man, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; and Fish Have No Feet, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Philip Roughton was born in the US in 1965 and now lives in Iceland. He is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of modern Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous Icelandic writers, including the Nobel prize-winning author Halldór Laxness.