Heaven and Hell

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By (author): Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Translated by: Philip Roughton

“Stefánsson shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy.”—Eileen Battersby, TLS

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.

AUTHOR

Jón Kalman Stefánsson

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. His books include Heaven and Hell; The Sorrow of Angels, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; The Heart of Man, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; and Fish Have No Feet, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Philip Roughton was born in the US in 1965 and now lives in Iceland. He is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of modern Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous Icelandic writers, including the Nobel prize-winning author Halldór Laxness.

AUTHOR

Philip Roughton

Reviews

Praise forHeaven and Hell

A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place Stefnsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans but hes not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations

Kirkus Reviewsstarred review

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 trilogyopening novelHeaven and Hell

Foreword Reviews

ltspan classqlcursorgtltspangtA 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

Praise forYour Absence is Darkness

Comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefnssons book nor the uniqueness of his prose rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton

Daniel MasonNew York Times

Stefansson uses the drama and comedy of everyday lives to dive into a broad range of topics philosophy music faith and even the science of earthworms

New York Times

Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard Mr Stefnsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism creating a spectral haunted atmosphere Questioning vulnerable and openly sentimental this is an absorbing commemoration of what the author calls the paradox that rules our existence the vivifying joy and paralyzing sorrow of loving another person

Sam SacksWall Street Journal

I couldnt put it down

Washington Post

What makes this so irresistible is the narrators constant optimism as he probes profound questions from within the murk of his consciousness Give me darkness and then Ill know where the light is Stefnsson is poised to make his mark on the world stage

Publishers Weeklystarred review