Boudoir - by Sigrún Pálsdóttir (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The latest novel from the winner of the 2021 European Union Prize for Literature.

In this unlikely coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of Iceland's unexpected steps into the age of spaceflight, teen protagonist Teddý sets out from her rural farm--spurred on by a chance encounter with an astronaut amid the lava--to try to find her place in a world built for men.

We follow her life across five decades--from the stark quiet of rural Iceland to the glossy, sticky world of 1970s air travel and the humdrum world of bank accounts and check fraud. Told in a shifting, prismatic structure, Boudoir introduces readers to an exciting new heroine who refuses to let things be the way they are just because they are the way they are.

With piercing clarity and dry, unsentimental wit, Pálsdóttir--historian, novelist, and one of Iceland's most compelling contemporary voices--captures the dissonance between how we are seen and who we are. Boudoir is a novel about reinvention, dislocation, and the forceful gravity of the lives we try to leave behind.

About the Author

Sigrún Pálsdóttir (Reykjavík, 1967) is a writer and historian. She completed a PhD in the History of Ideas at the University Oxford in 2001, after which she was a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Iceland. She worked as the editor of Saga, the principal peer-reviewed journal for Icelandic history, from 2008 to 2016. Her previous titles include the historical biography Thora. A Bishop's Daughter and Uncertain Seas, a story of a young couple and their three children who were killed when sailing from New York to Iceland aboard a ship torpedoed by a German submarine in 1944. Sigrún's work has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, Icelandic Women's Literature Prize, HagÞenkir Non-fiction Prize, and the DV Culture Prize. Uncertain Seas was chosen the best biography in 2013 by booksellers in Iceland.

Lytton Smith, a poet, translator, and teacher, is a former NEA Literature Translation Fellow and the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Square, winner of the New Michigan Press/Diagram Chapbook Contest. He has translated over a dozen novels and nonfiction works from Icelandic, twice being a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. He lives in Rochester, NY.