Töfrahöllin

The summers which the young Jósep spends in the countryside at the farm of Litla-Háfi with older male working-class relatives on his mother's side provides a reference point of happiness and wellbeing through his often dystopian later life.

These relatives are his maternal grandfather, a committed communist, and another male relative of roughly Jósep's mother's generation, the farmer Símon, who is milder than Jósep's grandfather and a yet more reliable touchstone for prudent, traditional, rustic Icelandic values.

The novel ends with Fatma popping back to Turkey to collect her daughter in order to bring her to Iceland, retire from sex-work, and, we are promised, to join Jósep in belated petit-bourgeois comfort.

The author claimed that the novel, which covers a thirty-five-year span, was thirty years in the making, and attempted to track the changing national character and self-image of Iceland.

Meanwhile, Kormákur himself is modelled on the 'sinister, manipulative' elvish king in Goethe's poem 'Der Erlkönig', which was inspired by the same ballad-tradition.