My debut novel 'On A Small Island' will be three years old next month but thanks to my publishing deal with the wonderful Fahrenheit Press it is now starting to reach a whole new audience all over the world. I was thrilled to receive this review today from one of Fahrenheit's most talented authors, the lovely Jo Perry. Her books 'Dead Is Better' and Dead Are Best' are two of Fahrenheit's most entertaining releases so it was a thrill to hear what she thought of my debut effort.
"This masterful, chilling, and
stormy Nordic noir page-turner is much more than a whodunnit. In finding the
location and identity of her siblings' abductor and the murderer of her
father's farm hand and beloved horse, Nicol's stubborn, brave and complex narrator
and protagonist, Ylfa Einarsdóttir, must confront horrific family secrets that
threaten her life and can obliterate her sense of who she is. Ylfa's identity,
like that of all Icelanders, comes not from a family name and history, but is
defined by a patronymic. Ylfa is Einar's daughter––her father's daughter––to
the world and to herself. Who her father was and is becomes the literal and
figurative darkness which she must escape to save herself. Lively, restive,
fearless and promiscuous Ylfa first hunts, and then is hunted by the person or
persons who has taken her sisters and who threatens her stern and distant
father. Her search takes her farther and farther away from Reykjavík's
comfortable mix of tradition and modernity until she, alone in Iceland's stark
and bone-chilling cold landscape, must confront the uncontrollable and deadly
forces of human nature. Ylfa is a wonderful mix of darkness and light,
blindness and strength. And I love the way Nicol uses horses as important
characters in the novel—as innocents, victims and true measures of our
humanity."
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