Your Absence Is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

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Your Absence Is Darkness

by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Narrator Ulf Bjorklund

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Translator Philip Roughton

Length 15 hours 16 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“I think I would have appreciated this more with the book in my hand, but the audio narration was tender and enjoyable. The narrative traces the lineage of a rural Icelandic community—one family in particular—a hundred years or so, meandering on its way. There is much talk of life and death, music, poetry, philosophy. There is much love and much pain, and, surprisingly, countless penises running around the fjords! Your Absence Is Darkness invites readers to take a melancholy stroll through feeling, possibility, and inheritance. ”
— Mary • Raven Book Store

Summary

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists.

A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there, or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer's wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.

Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.

Fiction