Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland - Softcover

Moss, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619021226 ISBN 13: 9781619021228

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2013

Synopsis

Sarah Moss had a childhood dream of moving to Iceland, sustained by a wild summer there when she was nineteen. In 2009, she saw an advertisement for a job at the University of Iceland and applied on a whim, despite having two young children and a comfortable life in Kent. The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland’s economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary, by the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull and by a collection of new friends, including a poet who saw the only bombs fall on Iceland in 1943, a woman who speaks to elves and a chef who guided Sarah’s family around the intricacies of Icelandic cuisine.

Moss explored hillsides of boiling mud and volcanic craters and learned to drive like an Icelander on the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She watched the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds, and as the weeks and months went by, she and her family learned new ways to live.

Names for the Sea is her compelling, beautiful and very funny account of living in a country poised on the edge of Europe, where modernization clashes with living folklore.

About this title

About the Author:

Sarah Moss was educated at Oxford University and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: Cold Earth and Night Walking, which was selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, and the co-author of Chocolate: A Global History. She spent 2009-10 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Iceland and now lives in west Cornwall.

From Booklist:

The author’s domestic adventures, challenges in understanding and adjusting to life in a cold and strange place, and admiration for the beauty of Iceland fill this meandering travel memoir of the year she and her family (husband and two small children) lived in Reykjavik while teaching at the University of Iceland. Moss, an Oxford-educated British novelist, captures the fierce beauty of the Arctic landscape, the hardships of establishing family life as foreigners on a local salary in a nation suffering an economic collapse, and most interestingly, the paradoxes of the national character. Icelanders “seem both outward-looking and insular, a nation of deeply provincial voyagers” who welcome foreigners but remain stoic, taciturn, and, at times, inscrutable. Moss is at her best when trying to make sense of the great pride and shame-filled inferiority that coexist within the people she meets. Her admirable prose on the weather, the light, volcanoes, and Icelandic folklore is interspersed, sadly, with repetitive laments about the subpar quality of imported fruit, lack of fresh vegetables, and Icelanders’ dependence on the automobile in a climate that is subfreezing nine months a year. --Jonathan Schwartz

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1619021226
• ISBN 13: 9781619021228
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368