Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week
3.990 kr.Iceland punches well above its weight in the world of music, producing global icons like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, and Laufey, while at the same time nurturing a vibrant local scene. This book explores how Iceland’s unique social habits, institutions and everyday practices contribute to its thriving music culture. Tracing the development of Icelandic popular music since the rock ’n’ roll era, it examines key influences shaping the scene, from Reykjavík’s musicians to national institutions like radio and concert venues.
With engaging explanations of sociological factors, the book sheds light on why Iceland has become a powerhouse in music. An illuminating journey through Iceland’s music history, this is a celebration of the artistry and cultural forces behind its global impact.
Always Home, Always Homesick: A Love Letter to Iceland
4.690 kr.From the bestselling author of Burial Rites comes an inspirational memoir about her travels in Iceland, an extraordinary country that has forged a nation of storytellers. When she was seventeen years old, Hannah Kent travelled to Iceland from Australia. She’d never seen snow before, didn’t speak a word of Icelandic.
All she knew was that she wanted to have an experience – to soak up something of the world. Soon she found herself isolated in a remote part of Iceland in a dark winter. It was a gruelling experience, but she quickly fell in love with the country: with its brutally beautiful landscapes and with its people.
On returning home, with images of Iceland’s towering glaciers and windswept tundras in her dreams, Hannah began to write. Now, as a mother and a wife, she looks back to that extraordinary year in Iceland.
Vaim
3.990 kr.Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him.
She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing. Vaim, Jon Fosse’s first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange…
The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin
5.990 kr.When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.
Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and the imagination and representation of them.
With contributions by Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, Marilyn Strathern. Co-published by Spiral House and AA Publications to coincide with an exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association, London, opening on 10 October 2025.
Indignity: A Life Reimagined
4.690 kr.There is something about the human spirit, she would say, that withstands all attempts at offence, injury or humiliation we call it dignity
When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions.
Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.
What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty.
Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?
By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction.
Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo
4.390 kr.A lavishly illustrated edition of Murakami’s classic short story. Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs.
A skinny little man no more than five foot three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog’s imposing bulk. ‘Call me “Frog,”’ said the frog in a clear, strong voice. Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this special edition of Murakami’s celebrated short story sees the bewildered Katagiri find meaning in his humdrum life through joining forces with Frog in an effort to save Tokyo from an existential threat.
Bunny
3.490 kr.We call them Bunnies because that is what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny.
Samantha Heather Mackey is an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at Warren University. In fact, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort – a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other ‘Bunny’. But then the Bunnies issue her with an invitation and Samantha finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door, across the threshold, and down their rabbit hole.
Blending sharp satire with fairytale horror, Bunny provides a hilarious look at the dark side of female friendship from one of fiction’s most original voices.
Maggie
4.690 kr.A man and a woman walk into a restaurant.
The woman hopes they will order the best wine on the menu.
Instead, her husband tells her he is having an affair with a woman called Maggie.When her chest starts to ache, the woman goes to a doctor who tells her the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak – but – cancer. She decides to call the tumour Maggie and begins to strike up a conversation with it.
In turns wildly funny and devastatingly tender, Maggie takes place during a pause -between divorce and marriage, sickness and health, the unknown and the status quo.
In reaction to the unfolding chaos, the heartbroken woman creates ‘A Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual’ filled with a thousand facts for the real Maggie about the man they both love. In the tradition of Nora Ephron’s writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is set to be the divorce novel of our age.
