The Sorrow of Angels

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 elemental Trilogy About the Boy, The Sorrow of Angels is a timeless literary masterpiece that evokes the human struggle within the ferocious majesty of nature.

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.