Description

Teddy lives with her parents on a farm in the Icelandic wilderness. It’s 1962, and the world is changing, although you wouldn’t know it from the stark quiet of the lava fields and mountains that mark the boundaries of the young woman’s existence. But after two chance encounters, Teddy’s dreams of a world beyond begin to crystallise, albeit in strange and unexpected ways, as we follow one woman’s life over five decades, from farm to city to the skies.With piercing clarity and dry, unsentimental wit, Sigrun Palsdottir – historian, novelist, and one of Iceland’s most compelling contemporary voices – brilliantly captures the dissonance between how we are seen and who it is we are. Taking us from grandeur of rural Iceland to the glossy, sticky world of 1970s air travel, via check fraud, thwarted ambition and lost astronauts, Boudoir is a novel about reinvention, dislocation, and the forceful gravity of the lives and selves we think we’ve left behind.

Publisher Review

‘Boudoir is a magical novel; sneakily political, quietly addictive, and devastatingly honest. Its characters feel completely real, but also persistently strange and unknowable, as all real people are. The eerie landscapes of rural Iceland are precisely brought to life, and I fell in love with the heroine, Teddy, born with a brilliant mind, steely courage, and all the wayward longings of an action hero in a world that can only see her as a pretty girl whose talents are irrelevant. I was completely swept away by it.’ – SANDRA NEWMAN, AUTHOR OF JULIA AND THE HEAVENS

‘What I admire most about Palsdottir’s writing is her ability to orchestrate the random […] and the way she covers real tensions and worries with a quilt of details, as they are so often covered in life.’ – REIN RAUD, EUROPEAN LITERATURE NETWORK