Saga: A Novel

A mesmerizing new novel by the National Book Award finalist Salvatore Scibona, about an Icelandic girl with no family, on a solitary voyage across the country, whose life becomes entangled with Iceland’s sudden emergence into a new world

After the spring thaw in the Eastfjords of Iceland, a widow fostering a girl named Unnur, who has no family, is found dead. Malnourished and badly burned, Unnur must travel alone, spurred by reckless courage, to the capital, Reykjavík, if there is going to be any hope for her. Evading predatory men, she journeys through sleet storms and wastelands, across a glacier, until she falls unexpectedly into the care of a wealthy Danish couple who, along with their children, are hiding in Iceland from the forces of both history and fate. As the struggle for Iceland’s independence and Unnur’s own quest for self-determination collide, events both terrible and beautiful are set in motion.

Otherworldly, timeless, and utterly original, Saga is at once a story about personal salvation, and the tectonic power of war and literature to shape and undo the lives of people and nations. Sublimely mixing dreams and history to invent something unlike anything in contemporary literature, Scibona writes mythopoetically about the people and history of Iceland—about tenth-century saga heroes whose feats and ideals define the national spirit, about the singular drive that sends Unnur on a saga of her own a millennium later, and about the excruciating choices we all must make if we are ever to take full possession of our lives.