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.

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