Osmann

Autorentext

THE AUTHOR: Joachim B. Schmidt, born in 1981, emigrated from Switzerland to Iceland in 2007. He is the author of several novels and short stories, and a journalist and columnist. Joachim, who is Swiss and Icelandic, lives in Reykjavik with his wife and their two children. He is the author of the prize-winning novel "Kalmann", its sequel "Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain" and of "Tell", a powerful retelling of the William Tell saga. THE TRANSLATOR: Jamie Lee Searle is a well-known translator from German and Portuguese into English. She has translated novels by Urs Faes, Anna Kim, Marc-Uwe Kling, Christoph Ribbat and the first Kalmann books of course. She lives in Winchester, UK.

Klappentext

In Ósmann, Ferryman of the North, Joachim B. Schmidt delivers his most accomplished novel to date: a luminous work of historical fiction inspired by the true life of Jón Magnússon Ósmann (1862-1914), a legendary ferryman from northern Iceland. In lyrical, myth-infused prose, Schmidt portrays love, loss and resilience on a remote fjord in the north of the country.

For more than forty years, Ósmann has rowed people, animals, and goods across the icy waters of Skagafjörður, becoming a figure of near-mythic stature. A fisherman and a winter seal hunter, a poet, drinker and devout believer, he shelters the needy and lives in close communion with a landscape where elves, ghosts and faith coexist. His generous spirit extends to friendships and to three great loves, yet his life is marked by profound loss: children die in infancy, friends drown or emigrate, and modernity slowly encroaches on the valley he has always known.

Told with fluid, lyrical prose and a deep sense of place, Ósmann blends history, myth and human vulnerability to evoke a vanished way of life at the edge of the Arctic. Beautiful, moving and quietly powerful, it confirms Schmidt -- already well known to English-language readers for Kalmann and Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain -- as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European fiction.