Eyland (e. Island) is Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir’s debut novel. This gripping piece of speculative fiction tells the story of journalist Hjalti and his ex-girlfriend María who’ve just broken up as Iceland mysteriously loses all contact with the outside world. The series of events that follows evokes the same questions Icelandic society was asking itself at the time of the book’s publishing. But instead of quiet pondering, Eyland turns the need for conclusive answers into an unavoidable existential necessity. What is the role of media during a crisis? Who gets to be ’Icelandic’? And how strong is our compassion in the face of personal demise?

This is the first volume of poems by the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) to be published in Icelandic. The volume is split up into three sections, with the first one being characterized by unbridled despair and cruel wrath. The poems scratch their way into the reader’s mind with graphic imagery of oozing blood and fragile flesh, leaving the narrator’s soul laid bare to the world like an open wound. The second part features Pizarnik’s series of prose poetry called “La condesa sangrient” (e. “The Bloody Countess) which tells the story of Erzébet Bathory, an infamous medieval Hungarian countess who’s said to have murdered 650 young girls in a grotesque manner. The intensity of the horror eases up in the final part of the volume, where the tone shifts towards an almost serene acceptance of impending doom.

Truflunin (e. Disturbance) by Steinar Bragi introduces Halla, a social psychologist who’s been tasked to enter the ‘Disturbance’, a temporospatial anomaly that has engulfed the historic center of Reykjavík, to find the missing Agent F. I find the novel unique within the Icelandic literary scene as it manages to weave other-worldly science fiction elements into the incredibly grounded reality of downtown Reykjavík. Truflunin is a deeply cerebral work that examines the divergence of consciousness, while still maintaining an engaging and well-structured plot, which has come to define Steinar Bragi’s superb contributions to genre fiction.