I recently returned from my first trip to Iceland. We went in February, mostly to give ourselves the best chance of seeing the Northern Lights, one of the things for which Iceland is most known. What I didn’t expect was how central books feel to the place.
There’s a long-standing tradition there, Icelandic Christmas Book Flood, where people exchange books on Christmas Eve and spend the night reading. Reykjavík has an outsized number of bookstores for a city its size, and they feel embedded rather than ornamental.
In the bookstore closest to our hotel, The Old Bookstore recommended 2 books: The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson and Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.
The Good Shepherd is structurally simple. Benedikt, a middle-aged shepherd, heads into the highlands during Advent to retrieve sheep that didn’t make it back before winter, traveling with his dog and a bellwether goat. It is short, barely over a hundred pages, and nothing about the plot is doing heavy lifting.
The writing stays close to the surface and then opens slightly when it turns toward the landscape or Benedikt’s sense of obligation, never decorative and always scaled to what is in front of him. The terrain a distinct character, the weather has weight, and the animals are central to the story. Everything sits at roughly the same level of importance, which gives the book its shape and steadiness. There is no attempt to build tension beyond what the journey already provides. The prose is stark and straightforward, like Benedikt, like the landscape.
Miss Iceland works in a different way. Hekla leaves a rural town for Reykjavík with the intention of becoming a writer, placing her at odds with the expectations around her, while her friend navigates the difficulty of living openly as a gay man.
The novel removes almost all interior explanation. Hekla does not tell us how she feels, and the narration does not interpret events on her behalf. Conversations are presented directly, reactions are implied, and the text avoids guiding the reader toward an emotional conclusion. What would usually be spelled out is left off the page.
And this is the genius of this book. Nothing is lost. Her frustration and ambition come through strongly. The absence of interior language does not create distance from the character. It sharpens her. It also exposes how much explanation most writing relies on, and how often that explanation is doing unnecessary work.
It invites comparison to Ernest Hemingway, though the effect here is less about underlying icebergs and more about control. The writing withholds rather than hints, and each line carries only what it needs to.
The Good Shepherd builds outward, grounding itself in movement through a physical world where meaning accumulates through action and endurance. Miss Iceland moves in the opposite direction, removing interior explanation and relying on what remains on the page.
The literary culture in Iceland ended up being one of the more surprising parts of the trip and these two books did more than reinforce that reputation. They frame the same question from different angles, which is how much a writer needs to put on the page.
One places the weight on the world itself. The other removes the instinct to explain what a character is feeling and shows how little is actually required for the reader to understand. Highly recommend both.
