[close] A childhood in Iceland is the background to this powerful and evocative tale.

Halldor Laxness's wistfully tender novel tells the tale of Alfgrim, an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf-and-stone cottage of Bjorn of Brekkukot, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what is now Reykjavfk. It evokes his boyhood and youth, spent at his grandparents' home in the early years of the twentieth century, a hospitable place where dignified understatement was the norm and where everything from a lumpfish to a Bible had a fixed price that never changed.