Twenty years after a son’s suicide, his family is still lost in grief. Told in alternating first-person voices, this is a haunting, deeply human novel about the secrets we keep and the grief we can’t outrun.

Vilborg and Elias, and their grown children Dagbjort and Funi, have spent two decades unable to speak of what happened to Daniel, the eldest son they lost. Each has built a private life around the silence; a marriage under strain, an addiction carefully hidden, a slow unravelling no one else can see. Structured as a novel-in-voices, with all five family members, including Daniel himself, taking turns narrating, the book follows one year in which old fractures finally surface, forcing the family to confront what they’ve spent twenty years avoiding.

Bjorn Halldorsson writes about grief without sentimentality, letting five distinct voices that are wounded, evasive and achingly human, carry the weight of what none of them can say aloud.

“The story tackles the extreme alienation of our modern smartphone age, while inspiring hope that the novel is still a form and medium that matters and can help us make sense of contemporary life… Though the book is rich in material with all its characters and subplots, it is not particularly long. The chapters are short and the narrative gripping. It’s a tight package.”
ABS, DV NEWSPAPER

“Persons Unknown is a masterpiece, enthralling fiction … crafted in such a way that the reader feels endless empathy for the characters. The story is humorous yet deals with a deeply serious and timely subject … A novel with a powerful and vital message, carried by the contradictions that characterize great literature.”
ELISABET JOKULSDOTTIR, AUTHOR

“The major themes, death and in particular the loss of a child, are handled with great sensitivity and respect by the author… a well-crafted and readable novel about an unhappy family that nevertheless finds its own way to live with life as it happened.”
GAUTI KRISTMANNSSON, ICELANDIC NATIONAL BROADCASTING SERVICE (RÚV)

★★★★
“One of the book’s great strengths lies … in the way the reader comes to know the characters differently from how they know one another. As the perspective shifts between them, new sides of events, relationships and old wounds are continually revealed. What one character experiences as self-evident can appear entirely different in another’s telling, and so the reader gradually becomes aware of the gap between how the characters see themselves, how they see each other, and what they have never brought themselves to say. … Persons Unknown is a finely crafted and thoughtful narrative that asks big questions through the everyday lives of ordinary people in contemporary Iceland. It explores what it means to be a person with one’s own inner world – thoughts, desires, hopes and pain – while at the same time needing to belong to others.”
MK, MORGUNBLADID DAILY

“A family trapped in denial, their everyday life a house of cards ready to collapse at the slightest tremor. Persons Unknown by Björn Halldorsson is a masterful novel told from multiple perspectives, one that leaves you torn between laughter and tears. A touching book, bittersweet but never clichéd.”
JOACHIM SCHMIDT, AUTHOR OF KALMANN

“Bjorn vividly describes the silence that so easily forms between us as human beings.”
MORGUNBLADID DAILY (ON ROUTE ONE)