Marcel Otten Books

Herra Bjornsson has experienced a life filled with extraordinary events and profound losses. She has witnessed the facade of her home crumble, heard the screech of brakes before her son, and seen her lover shot in the back. Her life is a tapestry woven with encounters, including a kiss with a young Beatle and a flirtation with Sartre in a Paris dive. Throughout the turmoil of war, she clings to her only treasures: two pearls from Casanova's necklace, only to have them devoured by a foolish German soldier. With a sharp wit, she has dismissed more than one man with the line, "The taxi has arrived," including the father of her first child in the delivery room. A descendant of Iceland's first president, she has traversed Europe, South Africa, and Argentina, befriending new faces (and admirers) online. Now, confined in a garage in Reykjavik with a laptop, cigarettes, and a German hand grenade, she is determined to outpace her illness while plotting her final, grand revenge.

From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.