Eighty-year-old Herra Bjornsson lives alone in a garage with her laptop, an oxygen tank and her father’s old hand grenade. Neglected by her family, she spends her days spying on her children by hacking their emails and preparing to lose the race against the ticking time bomb of lung cancer, even making an appointment for her own cremation. As she counts down her final days, Herra looks back at her own remarkable life. Her happy childhood in Iceland was disrupted by the outbreak of war and her father’s fervent love of Hitler. Shipped off to supposed safety, Herra spent the war trekking alone across war-torn Europe in a desperate bid to survive. Based on the first Icelandic president’s real-life granddaughter, Hallgrímur Helgason’s highly unusual and captivating tale spans the twentieth century in a way that is as hilarious as it is heart-breaking, taking readers on a whirlwind tour of Europe and South America before eventually returning home to Iceland where the final pieces of this haunting puzzle fall into place.

Hallgrímur Helgason is an Icelandic painter, novelist, translator, and columnist. His first novel was published in 1990 and he came to international fame with his third novel, 101 Reykjavik, which was translated into fourteen languages and was made into a film. A father of three, he divides his time between Reykjavík and the island of Hrísey. Brian FitzGibbon is a translator and author. He is the translator of 101 Reykjavik, also by Hallgrímur Helgason, and of Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014. He lives in Reykjavík.