This gripping novel is based on the fantastic but true story of the tragic life of Baron Charles Gauldrée Boilleau, a mysterious French/American musician and son of a French diplomat, turned farmer and entrepreneur in remote and backward Iceland in 1898–1901.
Baron Boilleau was a multifaceted man and the book gives us a vivid portrait of the “belle époque” of the Euro-American bourgeoisie, and how a man’s artistic aspirations and ideals of progress
become shipwrecked once they hit the barren shores of a backward Icelandic society. Sophisticated, a cellist and composer, educated in a British boarding school and with a second home on the Italian Riviera, Boilleau tries to establish a dairy in Iceland at the turn of the 1900’s. It can only lead to one thing: disaster. An exceptionally well written book by one of Iceland’s most popular and respected authors of the past quarter-century.
A book where the incredible is true, and the credible untrue.

“The Baron is a beautifully crafted book and a historical novel of the best possible kind.”
MORGUNBLADID NEWSPAPER

“The story of the baron in Hvitarvellir is absolutely charming.”
FRETTABLADID NEWSPAPER