A woman with a suitcase, stuck in a snowdrift. The village was white, the sea blue-black in the fleeting winter daylight, houses dotted the headland that stretched down to the sea and up the slope to where I was standing, stuck in the snowdrift, wondering if anyone had been watching my progress. Villagers were nosy, or so I’d heard, but I couldn’t see anyone looking up at the house that I’d come here to paint over the next few months.

After many months spent searching for a job, Flora heads to the West Fjords to paint a house in a seaside village. There she meets  an organist and three foreigners who work in a fish factory. All of them have a story that brought them to this place. They sing like angels but all of them wrestle with grief. Is it possible to carry one’s grief to the end of the world? In the isolation of the village, the weather seems to play many instruments, and its resonant song echoes powerfully in the soul. The Icelandic winter is white, and the cold  penetrates one’s bones.

A story of love, friendship, solidarity and safe havens in life, a story of communities that hold you in their embrace or—depending on the place—crush you in their iron grip.

“… a book that belongs among the author’s best
work … keeps the reader glued to the page.”
FRETTABLADID