Gente Independiente

Amid the bleak, frozen wastes of an Icelandic winter, Bjartur of Summerhouses tends his sheep. A proud, stubborn man, who ekes out his humble living in a constant battle against nature, he has at last acquired his own small holding after eighteen years as a hired hand.Halldór Laxness’s splendid achievement in this timeless, elemental masterpiece, which was one of the works for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, is to have evoked the mood and rhythm of life in an isolated community in a remote corner of Europe as no other writer has done since the time of the great Icelandic sagas. Richly lyrical, often humorous, conceived on a grand scale, and with a cast of memorable characters, Independent People is one of the truly great poetic novels of our century.