Under the glacier

Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress.

Paradise relaimed

The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-century Iceland with his wife and two adoring young children.

The fish can sing

The orphan Alfgrimur has spent an idyllic childhood sheltered in the simple turf cottage of a generous and eccentric elderly couple. Alfgrimur dreams only of becoming a fisherman like his adoptive grandfather, until he meets Iceland's biggest celebrity. The opera singer Gardar Holm’s international fame is a source of tremendous pride to tiny, insecure Iceland, though no one there has ever heard him sing.

Wayward Heroes

Wayward Heroes (Gerpla, 1952), previously published as The Happy Warriors

​​​​​​​This was the last novel by Laxness that split the nation into two camps, for and against. In it he chose to continue the work which, he said, had been begun by the author of The Saga of the Sworn Brothers: to expose hero worship and its combination of the absurd and the tragic.

The Atom Station

Ugla Falsdóttir, a young girl from the north, has gone to Reykjavík to work in service as a maid for a member of parliament and his wife, and also to learn the organ so that she can play in the country church that her father is building. But Ugla is soon drawn into the maelstrom of great events. Búi Árland, the member of parliament for the rural constituency she comes from, hosts secret meetings where, she gradually realises, influential figures discuss “selling Iceland” and stationing American troops in the country. Thus the story is a direct chronicle of the events of the day, even though Iceland did not join NATO until a year after Atom Station was published.

Iceland’s Bell

At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppressed Danish colony, suffering under extreme poverty, famine, and plague. A farmer and accused cord-thief named Jon Hreggvidsson makes a bawdy joke about the Danish king and soon after finds himself a fugitive charged with the murder of the king’s hangman.

World Light

A magnificently humane novel about unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Ólafur Kárason who has only one consolation: the belief that one day he will be a great poet.

Independent People

A magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.

Salka Valka

The Great Weaver from Kashmir

Laxness’ first major novel, the book that propelled Icelandic literature into the modern world. Shortly after World War One, Steinn Elliði, a young philosopher-poet dandy, leaves the physical and cultural confines of Iceland’s shores for mainland Europe, seeking to become “the most perfect man on earth.”