The fish can sing (Rev. English ed)

A childhood in Iceland is the background to this powerful and evocative tale.

Halldor Laxness' wistfully tender novel tells the tale of Alfgrim, an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf-and-stone cottage of Bjom of Brekkukot, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what is now Reykjavik.

It evokes his boyhood and youth, spent at his grandparents' home in the early years of the twentieth century, an hospitable place where dignified understatement was the norm and where everything from a lumpfish to a bible had a fixed price which never changed.