Four books that put you in Iceland. One, Independent People, is by a writer from Iceland and set there. The other three are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, the only Icelandic writer to do so. Behind him stand the medieval sagas, prose narratives about Icelandic families written down in the thirteenth century, and a folklore of elves and hidden folk that still shapes how Icelanders talk about their landscape.
Start with Laxness's Independent People, translated from Icelandic, about a stubborn sheep farmer in the remote highlands. Hannah Kent's Burial Rites fictionalises the last execution in Iceland, in 1830. Jacqueline Simpson's Icelandic Folktales and Legends collects tales of elves, hidden folk, ghosts and trolls tied to particular landscapes. Sarah Moss's Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland is a memoir of a year in Reykjavík just after the 2008 banking crash.
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A stubborn sheep farmer struggles for self-reliance in the remote Icelandic highlands of the early twentieth century, amid poverty, weather and folklore.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Iceland.
Fictionalises the last execution in Iceland, in 1830, and shows the poverty, farm life and bleak winters of the northern countryside.
A memoir of a year in Reykjavík just after the 2008 banking crash, covering daily life, language, weather and national mood.
Collected tales of elves, hidden folk, ghosts and trolls tied to specific landscapes and to rural Icelandic belief.
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