'Wildly original, morose, uproarious... It is also one of the funniest books ever written' Susan Sontag

A naive young man is sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate a small town that has reportedly lost its faith. The church is boarded up and the errant pastor lives with a woman who is not his wife. He has also allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. So the rumours go.

What he discovers is a community that regards itself as the centre of the world - earthly yet otherworldly, banal yet astonishing. Brimming with humour, mystery, and the supernatural this is a surprising and moving novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG

This is a novel of immense charm... It's a book of ideas, like no other Laxness ever wrote -- Susan Sontag
Under the Glacier is hilarious, in a deadpan, northern-edge-of-the-world sort of way -- Andrew O'Hehir * Salon *
Whimsical... deliriously funny... impishly chaotic * Kirkus Reviews *
Under the Glacier is a journey to the center of Laxness's antic imagination, and it is well worth the trip -- Vincent Czyz * The Arts Fuse *

Halldór Laxness (1908-98) was born near Reykjavik, Iceland. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction and one of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth-century, he wrote more than sixty books. Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955.