Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize - A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2024 - A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024

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 cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves--and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer's wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.

Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.

AUTHOR

Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Your Absence Is Darkness (Biblioasis International Translation Series, 45)

Fish Have No Feet

Ton absence n'est que ténèbres

Entre cielo y tierra (Trilogía del muchacho 1) (Spanish Edition)

Zomerlicht, en dan komt de nacht

La prima volta che il dolore mi salvò la vita (Narrativa) (Italian Edition)