Independent People

A beautifully jacketed hardcover edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s beloved epic novel about a stubbornly independent Icelandic sheep farmer and his spirited daughter.

Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland’s medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book’s protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur’s spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.

Author Biography

Halldór Laxness was born near Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1902. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction and one of the outstanding novelists of the century, he has written more than sixty books, including novels short stories, essays, poems, plays and memoirs. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1998.

ABOUT THE INTRODUCER:  John Freeman founded the literary annual Freeman’s and is the author of several books including Dictionary of the Undoing, Maps and the Park. Currently artist in residence at New York University, he has edited a trilogy of books on inequality, the latest of which is Tales of Two Planets. His work has been published in more than twenty languages.