Your Absence is Darkness

(Hardback)

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"Stefansson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy" EILEEN BATTERSBY, T.L.S. Supplement

"A wonderful, exceptional writer . . . A timeless storyteller" CARSTEN JENSEN

"Stefansson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendour" BOYD TONKIN, Spectator

A man finds himself in a church somewhere in the Westfjords, not knowing how he got there, or why. It's as if he has lost all his bearings.

When he discovers the inscription "Your absence is darkness" on a tomb in the village cemetery, a woman posing as the daughter of the deceased offers to take him to her sister who runs the only hotel in the area. The man then realizes that he is not just lost, but amnesiac: and yet everyone seems to know him.

Little by little, different stories then unfold as if to restore his lost memory, plunging him into the extraordinary history of a family, from the middle of the 19th century until 2020. Mistakes, weaknesses and renunciations dominate the lives of these women and men as much as the quest for happiness. All are faced with the question of how to love, and all must make difficult choices.

Your Absence Is Darkness is striking in its scale, its construction and its audacity: the number of characters, the span of time, the power of feelings, the violence of destinies - the stories are embedded in each other, forming an extraordinary mosaic, as if Stefansson had wanted to reconstitute the lost memory not of a character, but of all of humanity. The result is incandescent.

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Reviews

One of the great contemporary works of literature * Stern Magazine (Germany) *
Stefansson has created a masterpiece with this new novel. You don't want it to end. * NDR Kultur (Germany) *
Bursts with a narrative desire and an urge to live . . . as vivid as life itself. * Jyllands Posten (Denmark) *
Captivates with its complex questions about love, life and death, composed in a poetic and comical way. Stefansson is unsurpassed in writing about death and oblivion * Trouw (Netherlands) *
A extraordinary puzzle of a novel. * La Grande Libraire (France) *
Incontestably this winter's most beautiful title . . . Once again Stefansson proves his exceptional talent. * Livres Hebdo (France) *
Written in a language that hits you in the solar plexus, and a little above and below it too. * NRK (Norway) *
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. -- Tina Neylon * Irish Examiner *

Author Bio

Jon Kalman Stefansson'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) - and for Fish Have No Feet (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017).