[Nurba]

A nameless girl from Reykjavik is traveling away from home for the first time of her life. She is all alone, only 9 and already overwhelmed by homesickness. Her parents are sending her to the country as a punishment for some petty shoplifting. She is to stay at a farm all summer and earn her keep by working there. The farmer and his wife are indifferent, distant people. The farmhand is lonely and obsessed by sex and no fit companion for a little girl. The rebellious daughter (back from university) has her own problems and demons. There is little talking, feelings are suppressed. Contacts with the neighbouring farms are scarce, except for the spying on each other with binoculars and the get together at the annual district festival where all the farmer's families get staggeringly drunk together. Obviously country life is not all that idyllic.
The girl is aware that she has done something wrong and tries to take her utterly unfamiliar new world as it comes. The author makes us see this world through the eyes of a child who is not yet capable of analysis and introspection. She experiences her surrounding mainly through the senses and attempts to make sense of it by means of her imagination. This is the aspect of the book that I liked best, not Bergsson's pessimistic vision of the Icelandic countryside, but his spot-on expression of the mental life of a lonely little girl who finds herself in unknown, bewildering surroundings and tries to make the best of it. The world she has been exiled to may be rather harsh but in the landscape and the animals she is also able to see poetry. Her only means of escape therefore is using her imagination. Beautifully written and completely lacking in clich?s.