During a heatwave in the height of the haymaking season close to the Arctic Circle, a future poet and man of the world is born. In the lap of the region and its encircling mountains he experiences the world on his own terms, he learns the points of the compass and how to decline irregular English verbs, he faces a life-threatening situation, he has a hernia, and he takes up writing. In A Book of Childhood Palsson leads his readers down unusual paths around childhood lands of adventure, from birth to the age of fourteen, when he goes to Reykjavik to attend regular school for the first time.

A Book of Childhood is a work of recollection based on a person’s ability to remember, to bring back memories, to validate his existence with narration, above all to create text – to quote from the book: “He who has not been turned into text has not lived.”

Palsson was awarded the Icelandic Literary Award in 2007 for Notebook from Memory.

“The novel achieves almost a musical quality and resounds in the mind of the reader long after the final page.”
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

“One of the most captivating memoirs I have ever read.”
MORGUNBLADID NEWSPAPER