Heaven and Hell
Jón Kalman , Stefánsson
Heaven and Hell
Jón Kalman , Stefánsson
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Description
"Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy."--Eileen Battersby, TLS
In a remote part of Iceland, a young man joins a cod-fishing crew, but when a tragedy occurs at sea, he's appalled by his fellow fishermen's cruel indifference. Lost, broken by his experiences, he leaves the settlement in secret, his only purpose to return a book to a blind old sea captain who lives in a town beyond the mountains--and when he arrives, he finds that he isn't alone in his solitude: welcomed into a warm circle of outcasts, he begins to see the world anew.
Heaven and Hell navigates the depths of despair to celebrate the redemptive power of friendship. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, it is a reading experience as intense as the forces of the Icelandic landscape themselves.
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. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
Philip Roughton is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness. He was the winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's The Heart of Man, and shortlisted for the same prize for About the Size of the Universe.