The Blue Fox
Winner of the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize 2023
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- 4,49 €
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- 4,49 €
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2023
Winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize
'Enchantingly poetic . . . spellbinding . . . magical . . . exceptional' Independent
On a stark Icelandic mountainside, the imposing Reverend Baldur Skuggason hunts an elusive blue vixen for her near-mythical pelt. The treacherous journey across snow and ice will push his physical and mental endurance to the limit.
In Baldur Skuggason's parish, a young woman with Down's Syndrome is buried. After being found shackled to the timbers of a shipwreck in 1868, she was rescued by the naturalist Fridrik B. Fridjonsson. Now he will open the package she always carried with her, hoping to solve the puzzle of her origins.
As the ice begins to melt, the mystery surrounding the trio's connected fates is unravelled in this spellbinding fable, an exquisite tale of metamorphosis by one of Iceland's most acclaimed writers.
'A magical novel' Björk
'Describes its world with brilliant, precise, concrete colour and detail... Comic and lyrical.'AS Byatt, The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This short novel begins like a fragmented poem as a hunter appears to be losing his grip on reality in the hopes of capturing an elusive blue fox in the snowy, secluded woods: "Now the man has a chance of lessening the gap between himself and the little fox"; "Then he did an about-turn and got on all fours, raising his right leg like a dog pissing on a tussock." The story moves to the days before the hunt, with an eerie tale of a girl found in a ship's hold, and then continues into her eventual legacy. The shifts in chronology just before, just after create tension, at once elucidating and perplexing.