Part of Series
In a remote part of Iceland, a young man joins a boat to fish for cod, but when a tragedy occurs at sea he is appalled by his fellow fishermen’s cruel indifference. Lost and broken, he leaves the settlement in secret, his only purpose to return a book to a blind old sea captain beyond the mountains. Once in the town he finds that he is not alone in his solitude: welcomed into a warm circle of outcasts, he begins to see the world with new eyes. Heaven and Hell navigates the depths of despair to celebrate the redemptive power of friendship. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, it is a reading experience as intense as the forces of the Icelandic landscape themselves.
Author
Jón moved to Keflavík when he was 12 and returned to Reykjavík in 1986 with his highschool diploma. From 1975 – 1982 he spent a good deal of his time in West Iceland, where he did various jobs: worked in a slaughterhouse, in the fishing industry, doing masonry and for one summer as a police officer at Keflavík International Airport. Jón Kalman studied literature at the University of Iceland from 1986 until 1991 but did not finish his degree. He taught literature at two highschools for a period of time and wrote articles and criticism for Morgunblaðið newspaper for a number of years. Jón lived in Copenhagen from 1992 – 1995, reading, washing floors and counting buses. He worked as a librarian at the Mosfellsbær Library near Reykjavík until the year 2000. Since then he has been a full time writer. His first published work, the poetry collection, Með byssuleyfi á eilífðina, came out in 1988. He has published two other collections of poetry and a number of novels. His novel Sumarljós, og svo kemur nóttin (Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night) won The Icelandic Literature Prize in 2005. Three of his books have also been nominated for The Nordic Council's Literature Prize. He was the recipient of the Per Olov Enquists Prize for 2011, awarded at the book fair in Gautaborg in September 2011.
