My Yellow Submarine

Stefánsson is a writer of great scope and imagination — Ronan Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

A middle-aged man on a bench in a London park sees Paul McCartney sitting nearby.

Resolving to approach him, he gathers his thoughts and takes up the thread of his memories, marked by the Beatles' repertoire...

A mother plays "Yellow Submarine" on the harmonica to her seven-year-old son. She dies and leaves a void. A few months later, the Beatles split up. Another great loss in his life. A distant father, silent and abusive, does not help. Only when the boy finds shelter in his own yellow submarine — a room in the basement of the public library — does his life begin to take shape.

From one of Europe's most compelling stylists, My Yellow Submarine is a masterful and life-affirming novel that sees a boy's lonely childhood linked to timeless stories and legends, the Beatles, and the austerity of life in Iceland in the eighties.

Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere — Wall Street Journal

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton