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The Trilogy About the Boy #1
by Jón Kalman Stefánsson
In a remote fishing village, a boy and his best friend spend the lonely hours on shore reading and talking about poetry.
When the friend, absorbed in a borrowed copy of Paradise Lost, forgets his oilskin one morning and the crew is unexpectedly caught at sea in a savage winter storm, tragedy strikes. Overwhelmed by grief—and his crewmates' indifference to what has happened—the boy leaves the village, determined to return the book to its owner. The hardship and danger of the journey is of little consequence: he's already resolved to join his friend in death. But when he reaches the town where he intends to end his days, he couldn't have imagined the stories and lives he finds.
Navigating the depths of despair to celebrate the redemptive power of friendship, Heaven and Hell is an incandescent story of community, resilience, and love from one of Iceland's most celebrated novelists.
"A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place...Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he's not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] brief, elegiac novel...Written in dense, poetic prose, with more emphasis on mood than plot, this novel circles through the many ways of surviving in a harsh place." —Booklist
"The novel is lyrical in detailing hardscrabble life along polar sea shores, where everyone has lost someone, yet the fishing boats keep launching ... A poetic soul sets out on a quest to honor his lost friend in the aching, trilogy-opening novel Heaven and Hell." —Foreword Reviews
This information about Heaven and Hell was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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. 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). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
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