Independent People - Halldor Laxness Pages:320 pages Ailie is recently widowed

Ailie is recently widowed

With as much to say about the early years of the Cold War as about the political and social divisions that continue to divide the country today

It transported me to a world both familiar and utterly unknown

Now the public have to judge who should survive but are the passengers all that they first seem

Independent People - Halldor Laxness Pages:320 pages Ailie is recently widowedSet in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and bleakly