A tale of a poor farmer who abandons his land and family in pursuit of a dream of happiness, and chases it all the way to the Mormon communities in Utah. In the end he returns home convinced not only that all his efforts were in vain but that he has lost the most important thing of all.

“Laxness is a brilliant writer. He can capture
an elusive truth in a short span of words.”
WASHINGTON POST

“Laxness has genuine magic as a novelist.”
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

“Full of an earthy poetry . . . a style wonderfully wise and entirely Scandinavian in its combination of magic and reality.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“The qualities of the sagas pervade his writing, and particularly a kind of humor–oblique, stylized and childlike–that can be found in no other contemporary writer.”
ATLANTIC