Armann Valur Armannsson is an Icelandic scholar and proof-reader. Most of his life he has read texts by other people but now, when he’s into his sixties, he has started to wonder if he should maybe focus on his own writing. The only published work by him is a 218 word text that his friend, the composer Markus Geirhardur, set to music he wrote for a voice, strings, and radio waves. The work was published on a record but is not widely known, as it is a very progressive and unusual work of art. The text is also remarkable for the fact that possibly – in fact very likely – there is important information regarding an unsolved mystery with a disappearance, which happens to be the most famous case in Icelandic criminal history, the Case of Geirfinnur. Armann wrote the text after eavesdropping in on a conversation between two men in the restaurant Klubburinn in November 1974, two days before Geirfinnur disappeared. Noone aside from Armann and Markus knows anything about the real meaning of the text, not even the singer who performed it on the recording. But important information is no longer exciting when it is out in the open. And who better to judge the importance of suspense than the proof-reader?

REVIEWS
“So how long do we have to wait for English versions of his other books?”
LOS ANGELES TIMES

“…a tremendously funny author, a very well-crafted and entertaining book.”
KILJAN, ICELANDIC NATIONAL TV

“… a tremendously funny author, a very wellcrafted and entertaining book.”
KOLBRUN BERGTHORSDOTTIR, KILJAN/NATIONAL TV

“This is the most entertaining book that I have read this season, I laughed like a lunatic.”
FRIDRIKA BENONYSDOTTIR, KILJAN/NATIONAL TV

“It must be wonderful to write a book like this, refine it, weave it from old and new material, connect and ponder, uproot people and confront them with their unexceptional fates. And I really enjoyed reading this book, even though the fates of Armann and Esther are rather wretched, but such is life – and death.”
STEINUNN INGA OTTARSDOTTIR

“Bragi’s novels are little by little becoming an independent fictional world where the same characters walk in and out of individual stories, bump into each other and cut into each other’s lives …
A story about stories where characters and topics from the author’s previous stories appear in various ways.”
JON YNGVI JOHANNSSON, FRETTABLADID DAILY

“Absence seems to chase in eternal circles after its own tail … without ever sitting down. As such it stands very much at odds with those two branches of literature which have been most pronounced in recent years, the historical novel and the crime novel. …
The book is also brimming with subtle humour and the tragicomic awkwardness familiar from Bragi’s best books – Absence settles admirably into this decade-spanning revelry.”
ULFHILDUR DAGSDOTTIR, BOKMENNTIR.IS