The Ice Palace

I read this book twice last year, at the beginning of the year and the end, and my awe and delight at its beauty only increased. The story is simple—a new girl comes to a small Norwegian town, and makes a connection to a girl there—and the language is stripped down to its minimum. But oh my, the intensity that those simple words—some of them unspoken—carry! In other hands, this might have felt like a horror story, but Vesaas (a household name in Norway, but nearly unknown here) invests it with stark enchantment. When I describe it as a cross between Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, please forgive my glibness and know that I am giving it the highest praise I have.