Marcel Otten Book order (chronological)

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.

A portrait of an artist trapped by convention and expectations but longing for the chaos that can set her free. Growing up on a farm in early twentieth-century rural Iceland, Karitas Olafsdóttir, the youngest of six siblings, yearns for a new life. An artist, Karitas has a powerful calling and is determined to never let go of her true being, one unsuited for the conventional. But she is powerless against the fateful turns of real life and all its expectations of women. Pulled back time and again by design and by chance to the Icelandic countryside--as dutiful daughter, loving mother, and fisherman's wife--she struggles to thrive, to be what was she was meant to be. Spanning decades and set against a breathtaking historical canvas, Karitas Untitled, an award-winning classic of Icelandic literature, is a complex and immersive portrait of an artist's conflict with love, family, nature, and a country unaccustomed to an untraditional woman--but most of all, with herself and the creative instincts she has no choice but to follow.

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.