Monday, 19 December 2016

'On A Small Island' almost three years on.... review by Jo Perry.




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."





No comments:

Post a Comment