Your Absence is Darkness

Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere. -- Sam Sack * Wall Street Journal *
An astonishing, free-wheeling narrative of an amnesiac's search for meaning . . . a serpentine and splintered set of stories covering several generations . . . Stefansson is poised to make his mark on the world stage. * Publishers Weekly *starred review" *
Jón Kalman Stefánsson is a poet . . . Your Absence is Darkness is poetic and beautiful and so full of love and grief that it leaves no one untouched. * Morgunblaðið (Iceland) *
One of the great contemporary works of literature * Stern Magazine (Germany) *
Stefansson has created a masterpiece with this new novel. You don't want it to end. * NDR Kultur (Germany) *
Bursts with a narrative desire and an urge to live . . . as vivid as life itself. * Jyllands Posten (Denmark) *
Captivates with its complex questions about love, life and death, composed in a poetic and comical way. Stefansson is unsurpassed in writing about death and oblivion * Trouw (Netherlands) *
A extraordinary puzzle of a novel. * La Grande Libraire (France) *
Written in a language that hits you in the solar plexus, and a little above and below it too. * NRK (Norway) *
In his deeply unique 'history of humanity', Stefánsson doesn't want to provide answers. His aim is to bring to the fore the pivotal, perhaps impossible questions each of us feel when confronted with the spectacle of life. * La Repubblica (Italy) *
The Icelandic Dickens . . . He has the same gift of writing with great understanding, an empathy with troubled souls and a skill at laugh-out-loud comedy. -- Tina Neylon * Irish Examiner *
Incontestably this winter's most beautiful title . . . Once again Stefansson proves his exceptional talent. * Livres Hebdo (France) *
A wonderful family saga, pieced together through memories, myths, legends. Page after page, the characters emerge from the background, step closer, come alive. You just want to spend more time with them and never leave their world. * Corriera della Sera (Italy) *
Comparisons do not do justice to the complexity of Stefansson's book, nor the uniqueness of his prose, rendered here in a tumblingly beautiful translation by Philip Roughton . . . A late paragraph of exquisite beauty made almost no sense when I tried to include it here because it builds on over 400 pages that must be read first. -- Daniel Mason * New York Times *
A rich depiction of life, love and loss, brimming with stoical wisdom and quiet poignancy. Jón Kalman Stefánsson is a writer of great scope and imagination. -- Ronan Hession * author of LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL *