{"product_id":"your-absence-is-darkness-9781771965811","title":"Your Absence Is Darkness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves--and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer's wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIncandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, \u003cem\u003eYour Absence Is Darkness\u003c\/em\u003e is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJón Kalman Stefánsson\u003c\/b\u003e's novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel \u003cem\u003eSummer Light, and Then Comes the Night\u003c\/em\u003e received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: \u003cem\u003eHeaven and Hell\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eThe Sorrow of Angels\u003c\/em\u003e (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and \u003cem\u003eThe Heart of Man\u003c\/em\u003e (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, \u003cem\u003e Fish Have No Feet\u003c\/em\u003e, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePhilip Roughton\u003c\/b\u003e is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness. He was the winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's \u003cem\u003eThe Heart of Man\u003c\/em\u003e, and shortlisted for the same prize for \u003cem\u003eAbout the Size of the Universe\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Biblioasis","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50586171277586,"sku":"9781771965811","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_2d23851a-07e1-4de1-8631-1202dc7dc9a4.jpg?v=1732042327","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/your-absence-is-darkness-9781771965811","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}