Butterflies in November
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A translator of Icelandic, the unnamed young woman who narrates Butterflies in November is perhaps more at home in the world of language than the actual world. After a day of being dumped—twice—and accidentally killing a goose, she yearns to escape from the chaos of her life. Instead, her best friend’s four-year-old deaf-mute son is unexpectedly left in her care. But when the boy chooses the winning numbers for a lottery ticket, the two set off from Reykjavik along Iceland’s Ring Road on a journey of discovery.
Along the way, they encounter black sand beaches, cucumber farms, lava fields, flocks of sheep, an Estonian choir, a falconer, a hitchhiker, and both of her exes desperate for another chance. What begins as a spontaneous adventure will unexpectedly and profoundly change the way she views her past and charts her future.
Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir is a prize-winning novelist, playwright and poet. She also writes lyrics for the Icelandic performance pop band Milkywhale. Auður Ava's novels have been translated into over 25 languages, and they include Butterflies in November and Hotel Silence, also published by Pushkin Press. Hotel Silence won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the Icelandic Literary Prize, and was chosen Best Icelandic Novel in 2016 by booksellers in Iceland. Auður Ava lives in Reykjavik.
Read more from Auður Ava ólafsdóttir
Miss Iceland: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hotel Silence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Butterflies in November
88 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The narrator, who's a freelance translator and proofreader, decides it's time to make a change in her life after her husband walks out on her but then, irritatingly, keeps turning up again. And she has a bit of unfinished business to deal with in the eastern village where her grandmother used to live. However, just when she's announced that she's off to the East, her best friend Auður has to go into hospital, and she finds herself - notwithstanding protestations that she doesn't know the first thing about children and doesn't know sign-language - looking after Auður's four-year-old son, Tumi, who has serious hearing problems. The two of them set off down Highway No.1 in the depths of an unseasonably warm Icelandic November, negotiating hazards including floods, landslides, Estonian choirs, roadkill and available single men, and by the time they get to the prefabricated summer cottage that the narrator has won in a charity lottery, the woman and the child have somehow found each other and started working as a team.It's a quirky book, often very funny indeed, but always rather jumpy and unresolved, full of unnamed characters who seem to overlap a little with each other, switching between present, past and dreams, and just at the point where we might have been expecting a joined-up ending, we get a compilation of recipes for all the food consumed in the course of the book (up to and including "undrinkable coffee"). And a knitting pattern. The "recipes" of course are not just recipes, but give us various hints from which we have to try to work out a resolution to the story ourselves. Or at least we could, if those hints only joined up somehow...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quirky, quick and run read.