Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE ICELANDIC LITERATURE PRIZE

"The Icelandic Dickens" Irish Examiner

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

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

"Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger"

Sometimes a distance from the world's tumult opens our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars.

The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. With humour, with poetry, and with a tenderness for human weaknesses, Stefansson explores the question of why we live at all.

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

“A wonderful, exceptional writer . . . A timeless storyteller”

Stefánsson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendour. -- Boyd Tonkin Spectator
Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy -- Eileen Battersby Times Literary Supplement
Powerful and sparkling . . . Prize-winning translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing -- Irish Times Nora O'Mahony
Carsten Jensen
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

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).

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE ICELANDIC LITERATURE PRIZE "The Icelandic Dickens" Irish Examiner "Stefansson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy" EILEEN BATTERSBY, T.L.S. Supplement "A wonderful, exceptional writer . . . A timeless storyteller" CARSTEN JENSEN "Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger" Sometimes a distance from the world's tumult opens our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars.The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. With humour, with poetry, and with a tenderness for human weaknesses, Stefansson explores the question of why we live at all. Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

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