From the Icelandic Dickens (Irish Examiner),” a writer who shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy” (Times Literary Supplement), comes this profound and playful masterwork of literature—winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize and longlisted for France's Prix Medicis Étrangere—that ponders the beauty and mystery of life and our deepest existential questions.In small places, life becomes bigger.Sometimes distance from the world's tumult can open our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars.The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. With humor, poetry, and a tenderness for human weaknesses, Jon Kalman Stefánsson explores the question of why we live at all.