Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night: A Novel

Product Description 
A NEW YORK TIMES GLOBETROTTING PICK! 
Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger. 
SUMMER LIGHT AND THEN COMES THE NIGHT is a profound and playful masterwork from one of Iceland’s most beloved authors that explores the dreams and desires of ordinary people in a rural town. 
In a village of only four hundred inhabitants, life could seem unremarkable. Yet in this remote town, a new road to the city has change on everyone’s minds. 
There is the beautiful, elusive Elisabet who cuts a surprisingly svelte path at The Knitting Company. Neighbors Kristin and Kjartan who seem…normal, but for their explosive passion that bewilders even themselves (and ignites the spectacular revenge of Kjartan’s wife). And then the most successful businessman in town decides to ditch his Range Rover and glamorous wife in exchange for Latin books and stargazing. 
Unexpected, warm, and humorous, Stefansson explores the dreams and desires of these everyday people, and reveals the magic of life in all of its progress, its complacency, its ugliness and, ultimately, beauty. 
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE ICELANDIC LITERATURE PRIZE 
 Review 
"Stefánsson's immersive prose swells, thunders and sparkles with all the shifting moods of the of the sea on an Icelandic summer’s day.” -- The Independent (UK)\n"Powerful and sparkling. . . . Prize-winning translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing." -- Irish Times\n"The Icelandic Dickens...He has the same gift of writing with great understanding, an empathy with troubled souls and a skill at laugh-out-loud comedy." -- 
Irish Examiner\n"Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy." -- Times Literary Supplement (London)\n"A wonderful, exceptional writer. . . . A timeless storyteller." -- Carsten Jensen\n"Jón Kalman Stefánsson's lyrical style has earned him a dedicated following of readers in Iceland. [In] 
Summer Light and Then Comes the Night each standalone story describes life in a small village in West Iceland, normal people—their insecurities and anxieties, their courage and loneliness. Together, these episodes create one, coherent whole; there’s no set narrator, but rather, it’s the village that tells these stories of hope, cruelty, life, and death." -- Literary Hub\n"Stefánsson is a superb storyteller with a metaphysical bent. He draws characters with empathy and wit, and frames their condition in existential dichotomies: modernity versus the past, mystical versus rational, destiny versus coincidence." -- 
Booklist\n"Stefánsson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendor." -- The Spectator\n"An immersive and funny portrait of a community whose members squabble and celebrate in equal measure." -- 
Publishers Weekly\n"Wistful and whimsical....[Stefánsson's] writing is fertile, yielding extraordinary imagery. There are many tears in these stories and in this village, but there is also hope, because even unfulfilled dreams offer guidance, 'they evaporate and settle like dew in the sky, where they transform into the stars in the night.'" -- 
Minneapolis Star Tribune 
 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 includeHeaven 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.

Literature & Fiction

Stefánsson, Jón Kalman

United States

HarperVia

A NEW YORK TIMES GLOBETROTTING PICK! 
Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger. 
SUMMER LIGHT AND THEN COMES THE NIGHT is a profound and playful masterwork from one of Iceland’s most beloved authors that explores the dreams and desires of ordinary people in a rural town. 
In a village of only four hundred inhabitants, life could seem unremarkable. Yet in this remote town, a new road to the city has change on everyone’s minds. 
There is the beautiful, elusive Elisabet who cuts a surprisingly svelte path at The Knitting Company. Neighbors Kristin and Kjartan who seem…normal, but for their explosive passion that bewilders even themselves (and ignites the spectacular revenge of Kjartan’s wife). And then the most successful businessman in town decides to ditch his Range Rover and glamorous wife in exchange for Latin books and stargazing. 
Unexpected, warm, and humorous, Stefansson explores the dreams and desires of these everyday people, and reveals the magic of life in all of its progress, its complacency, its ugliness and, ultimately, beauty. 
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE ICELANDIC LITERATURE PRIZE

Jón Kalman Stefánsson is the winner of the Icelandic Prize for Literature and has been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature. 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. Der Spiegel said it was “like an oyster—a glinting treasure in a rough shell.” In a remote part of Iceland, a boy and his friend Barður join a boat to fish for cod. A winter storm surprises them out at sea and Barður, absorbed in “Paradise Lost”, succumbs to the ferocious cold and dies. Distraught from the murky circumstances of Barður’s death, the boy leaves the village, intending to return the book to its original 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.

Heaven and Hell

Literary

MacLehose Press

The Sorrow of Angels is the second novel in an epic and elemental trilogy by the winner of the Icelandic Prize for Literature Jón Kalman Stefánsson, and the follow up to Heaven and Hell (publishing in paperback 3/11/15.) The Sorrow of Angels continues to follow "the boy" who, after suffering a terrible loss at sea, stops at a small Icelandic village that will become his adopted home and his redemption. The book is a part of a trilogy, but as Susan Swarbrick wrote in The Herald Scotland, "If you haven't read Heaven And Hell, the first in Reykjavik-born author Jon Kalman Stefansson's captivating trilogy, that needn't be a deterrent from falling head over heels in love with The Sorrow Of Angels."It is three weeks since the boy came to town, carrying a book of poetry to return to the old sea captain-the poetry Bár?ur died for. Three weeks, but already Bár?ur'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 Hamlet, Jens the postman stumbles in half-dead, having almost frozen to his horse. On his next journey to the fjords Jens 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 and powerful story that evokes the struggle of man against the ferocious majesty of nature. Asked by The Independent what inspired him to write these three novels, Stefánsson named his first visit to the landscape of Iceland's West Fjords. "It was like a punch in the solar plexus . . . The mountains seemed to be saying, 'Why aren't you writing about us?" (Independent, 2013).

The Sorrow of Angels

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 Álfhei?ur, who makes him wonder whether it is possible to love two women at once; he had believed his heart was lost to Ragnhei?ur, 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 Human Heart is a profound exploration of life, love, and desire, written with a sublime simplicity. In this conclusion to an audacious trilogy, Stefánsson brings a poet's eye and a philosopher's insight to a tale worthy of the sagasmiths of old.

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.

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

Biblioasis

Entre ciel et terre

Contemporary

Gallimard]

Фоліо

Ásta: Où se réfugier quand aucun chemin ne mène hors du monde ? (Folio) (French Edition)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stefánsson, Jón Kalman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stefánsson, Jón Kalman

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stefánsson, Jón Kalman. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night: A Novel

Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night: A Novel

Heaven and Hell

The Sorrow of Angels

Heaven and Hell

The Heart of Man

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

Entre ciel et terre

Entre ciel et terre

Ásta: Où se réfugier quand aucun chemin ne mène hors du monde ? (Folio) (French Edition)