Marcel Otten Book order (chronological)

Bestselling novel by Iceland's outstanding writer - soon to be a film starring Olafur Darri Olafsson (TRAPPED)

A darkly comic and explosive tale of a world at war and one island girl's struggle to survive

Hart van vuur en ijs is het aangrijpende levensverhaal van de getalenteerde kunstenares Karitas Jónsdóttir, en speelt zich af in IJsland, Parijs en Rome. Op een uitzonderlijke invoelende manier wordt beschreven welke offers Karitas moet brengen om haar kunst te kunnen uitoefenen. Memorabele karakters maken hun opwachting in deze emotionele roman, die geen lezer onberoerd zal laten.

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.