I was so entranced by Miss Iceland that I ended up reading it all in one day.

It’s 1963, and Hekla is leaving home at 21 to go live in Reykjavik and become a writer. She has plans to stay with her best friend Jón John Johnsson, while he is at sea, and she also has another friend there, Ísey, a young mother.

Hekla gets a job waitressing in a hotel restaurant, but when middle-aged men try to grope her, she is told to put up with it. One man repeatedly tries to get her to enter a Miss Iceland competition. She is not interested but later learns that another girl who entered was raped by one of the presenters. She really only wants to write, read, and visit her friends.

She loves Jón John, but he is gay, and apparently 1960s Iceland is no place for a gay man. He brings her clothes from Hull and dreams of escape.

Ísey also has ambitions to be a writer and fears that she will only have more children. Soon, she is pregnant again.

Hekla finds that in Iceland, poets are men. She gets a boyfriend, Starkadur, who is a poet and works in a library. She hides from him that she is a published poet, and when she asks about Mokka, the café where the poets hang out, she is told they don’t welcome girlfriends. When Starkadur finds out she is not only a poet but more gifted than he is, he begins obsessing and can no longer write. Still, he wants to marry her and buys her a cookbook for Christmas.

I can’t really describe what was so fascinating about this book. Hekla herself is quite detached, although not from her friends. I think it was because the story seemed real, not at all contrived. The ending is a little abrupt and unexpected, but I liked the story and wanted there to be more. The novel explores friendship, the urge to create, and the search for self-expression. It’s both delicate and powerful.

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