The Sorrow of Angels - (Trilogy about the Boy) by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The second installment in Stefánsson's Trilogy About the Boy is a timeless story that portrays the human struggle for hope within the ferocious majesty of Iceland.

It's been three weeks since the boy came to town, carrying a book of poetry to return to the old sea captain--the poetry Bárður died for. Just three weeks, but already Bárður's ghost has faded. Snow falls so heavily that it binds heaven and earth together.

As the villagers gather in the inn to drink schnapps and coffee while the boy reads to them from Hamlet, Jens the postman stumbles in half-dead, having almost frozen to his horse. On his next journey to the fjords, Jens is accompanied by the boy, and both must risk their lives for each other, and for an unusual item of mail.

The second installment in Stefánsson's Trilogy About the Boy, The Sorrow of Angels is a timeless and lyrical story that evokes the human struggle within the ferocious majesty of nature.

Review Quotes

Praise for Heaven and Hell

"A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place . . . Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans, but he's not without sympathy or an ability to find affirming qualities in difficult situations."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The novel is lyrical in detailing hardscrabble life along polar sea shores, where everyone has lost someone, yet the fishing boats keep launching . . . A poetic soul sets out on a quest to honor his lost friend in the aching, trilogy-opening novel Heaven and Hell."
--Foreword Reviews

"[A] brief, elegiac novel . . . Written in dense, poetic prose, with more emphasis on mood than plot, this novel circles through the many ways of surviving in a harsh place."
--Booklist

Praise for Your Absence Is Darkness

"Comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefánsson's book, nor the uniqueness of his prose, rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton."
--Daniel Mason, New York Times

"Stefansson uses the drama and comedy of everyday lives to dive into a broad range of topics: philosophy, music, faith, and even the science of earthworms."
--New York Times

"Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mr. Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere . . . Questioning, vulnerable and openly sentimental, this is an absorbing commemoration of what the author calls the paradox that rules our existence, the vivifying joy and paralyzing sorrow of loving another person."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"I couldn't put it down."
--Washington Post

"What makes this so irresistible is the narrator's constant optimism as he probes profound questions from within the murk of his consciousness ('Give me darkness, and then I'll know where the light is'). Stefánsson is poised to make his mark on the world stage."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

Jón Kalman Stefánsson's novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature and his novel Summer Light, and then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. His books include Heaven and Hell; The Sorrow of Angels, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; The Heart of Man, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; Fish Have No Feet, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Philip Roughton was born in the US in 1965 and now lives in Iceland. He is a scholar of Old Norse and mediaeval literature and an award-winning translator of modern Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous Icelandic writers, including the Nobel prize-winning author Halldór Laxness.