Under the Glacier

A young emissary of the Bishop is sent from Reykjavik to a small town to investigate whether they are following Christianity: there are rumours that their pastor Jon Jonsson (known as Primus) has not drawn his salary for 20 years, that the church is boarded up and no services held, that the pastor lives with someone who is not his wife, and that he has allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. Instead of burying the dead, he carries them up to the glacier and leaves them there. But once the unnamed emissary arrives, he finds that this negligence counts only as a mild eccentricity in this highly superstitious community, which regards itself as the centre of the world. Overflowing with farce, mystery, and magic, ‘Under the Glacier’ is a wonderfully surprising and moving novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author.