On the Other Side Is March

The initial thing you might learn about this slim novel is that it is the first by a woman from the Faroe Islands—an autonomous Danish territory between Iceland and Scotland—to be translated into English. But as soon as you start reading it, if you are in the same time of life as me, you are likely to feel right at home. Our narrator is in her early sixties, in the "strange place" of being both a grandmother and her "mother's mother," taking care of an elderly woman who only sometimes remembers who her daughter is. The narrator's thoughts float with a kind of everyday abstraction, unmoored by her own unfamiliar position and by her mother's even greater drift, and are brought back to earth by the elements of daily life—Facebook, Harry Potter—that place her closer to our global modernity than the traditions of Faroese culture.