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…
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?
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.
The World Goes On
3.690 kr.A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils.
In The World Goes On , a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell (‘ for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me ‘). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: ‘Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…’
Satantango
3.690 kr.In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm.
But when the charismatic Irimias – long-thought dead – returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
The Last Wolf & Herman
3.490 kr.In The Last Wolf, a philosophy professor is mistakenly hired to write the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. His miserable experience is narrated in a single, rolling sentence to a patently bored bartender in a dreary Berlin bar.
In Herman, a master trapper is asked to clear a forest’s last ‘noxious beasts.’ Herman begins with great zeal, although in time he switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game… In Herman II, the same events are related from the perspective of strange visitors to the region, a group of hyper-sexualised aristocrats who interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman…
These intense, perfect novellas, full of Krasznhorkai’s signature sense of foreboding and dark irony, are perfect examples of his craft.
Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile
3.190 kr.Bonjour Tristesse tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry – with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile, which is also included in this volume, Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways.
Is a River Alive?
6.490 kr.From celebrated writer Robert Macfarlane comes this brilliant, perspective-shifting new book – which answers a resounding yes to the question of its title. At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Is a River Alive? takes the reader on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept.
The book flows first to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened by goldmining. Then, to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is under way. And finally, to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign.
At once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, spark debates and lead us to the revelation that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has.
The Poetic Edda
3.490 kr.‘She sees, coming up a second time, Earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,over the mountain hunting fish.’
After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress’s Prophecy which recounts the creation of the world, and looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are related.
The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the lovely goddesses and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and the implacable Gudrun. New in this revised translation are the quest-poem The Lay of Svipdag and The Waking of Angantyr, in which a girl faces down her dead father to retrieve his sword. Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty and profound, the poems of the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and a new generation of video-game and film makers.
The Mighty Red
3.490 kr.In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place.
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to his problems. Kismet can’t imagine her future, but she will settle for fulfilling his. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say ‘no’, and so the die is cast.
Meanwhile Crystal, Kismet’s mother, hauls sugar beets for Gary’s wealthy family. On her nightly truck drives from the farm, Crystal frets over what the future might hold – both for herself, and her daughter.
Starkly beautiful and vividly written, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendour, from one of our greatest living writers.
On Freedom
3.690 kr.A brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival – by the acclaimed, bestselling author of On Tyranny.
Freedom is the great Western commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means – and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government interference. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers and his own experiences, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes – the habits of mind – that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions but also the role of institutions. Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity and grace.
Snyder’s book On Tyranny has inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.
Four Family Stories
2.990 kr.A celebration of the humble pancake, and its ability to nourish, comfort, and connect us to loved ones. A shorter version was originally published online and in print with The L.A. Times, June 4th, 2025.
Pancake Cravings
1.690 kr.A celebration of the humble pancake, and its ability to nourish, comfort, and connect us to loved ones. A shorter version was originally published online and in print with The L.A. Times, June 4th, 2025.