Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

By Sarah Moss

A beautifully written memoir of a family’s year living in Reykjavik, Iceland that “captures the fierce beauty of the Arctic landscape”—from the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall (Booklist).

Sarah Moss had a childhood dream of moving to Iceland, sustained by a wild summer there when she was nineteen. In 2009, she saw an advertisement for a job at the University of Iceland and applied on a whim, despite having two young children and a comfortable life in Kent, England.

The resulting adventure was shaped by Iceland’s economic collapse, which halved the value of her salary; by the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull; and by a collection of new friends, including a poet who saw the only bombs fall on Iceland in 1943; a woman who speaks to elves; and a chef who guided Sarah’s family around the intricacies of Icelandic cuisine.

Moss explored hillsides of boiling mud and volcanic craters and learned to drive like an Icelander on the unsurfaced roads that link remote farms and fishing villages in the far north. She watched the northern lights and the comings and goings of migratory birds, and as the weeks and months went by, she and her family learned new ways to live. Names for the Sea is her compelling and very funny account of living in a country poised on the edge of Europe, where modernization clashes with living folklore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781619022171

Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss is the author of several novels and a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels are Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), Signs for Lost Children (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), The Tidal Zone (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and Ghost Wall, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2019. Sarah was born in Glasgow and grew up in the north of England. After moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik and West Cornwall, she now lives in the Midlands and is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.

Reviews for Names for the Sea

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Iceland is one of the youngest islands on the planet, given that it is being created as I write. It is also a land that has few trees, stark landscapes and is populated by a close knit community.

Mos fell in love with the country on a holiday and decides to take the plug and move there to take a position at the university for a year. As she finds her feet, she discovers that the people are as unique as the landscape around. It is tough to settle in at first, as very few properties are available to rent. As her and the family find their feet they start to settle in.

Through her contacts at the university, she starts to meet the people and the characters of the country. She meets a lady who claims to see the hidden people, the elves and trolls from the sagas. The people knit constantly, and she tries to take it up, but ends up crocheting.

She is there at the time of the credit crunch, where there is violence on the streets for the first time ever, and when the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupts. The Icelanders take it all in their stride.

It is a beautifully written book. Moss manages to get across the intensity of the country, and some of the frustrations with the language and the way that they do things. Unlike most travel books that are transitory, she is living there are is part of the community; her respect for the country and love of the natural phenomena such as the aurora, comes across really powerfully in the book.

[jamestomasino · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There's a lot of parallels to our own move to Iceland but it's different enough that I learned a bunch and felt taken for a ride, not spied upon.

[mijk_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A really useful book for anyone planning to go to live in Iceland, in parts, but seriously mistaken in others, a consequence of living in an academic bubble. It is beautifully written throughout and makes a 'good read' even for someone without any actual interest in Iceland. The author comes across as very likeable, but typical of her own cosmopolitan tribe and glibly unaware of it, except in the sense that she is outsider in the place where she has gone to live. Ironically, then, most of the book is about stereotypes, both outsiders' stereotypes about Icelanders and Icelanders' own about themselves and about outsiders. In that sense, it's an interesting study, and one the author isn't always aware of making, but when it actually tries to get 'interesting', it isn't.; superficiality rules.The nadir of the book is the chapter on faeries, and the sections on landscape (volcanoes etc) read well, but follow the paths of the tourist brochures. There is very little sense of Reykjavik or engagement in its culture and almost no historical depth, but this is a memoir of the insulated academic middle classes, true to its type and utterly oblivious to its omissions.

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

'Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland' is Sarah Moss's memoir of the year which she spent in Iceland with her husband and two small children, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009. I read Sarah Moss's first novel 'Cold Earth' a little while ago and loved it, and with Iceland being very high on the list of places I have always wanted to to visit, this book was always going to appeal. The author sets out her love affair of northerly islands on the first page of the book. 'It's not the real, white Arctic, the scene of centuries of bearded latitude competitions, that sets me dreaming' she says 'but the grey archipelago of Atlantic stepping-stones. Scilly, Aran, Harris, Lewis, Orkney, Fair Isle, Shetland, Faroe. Iceland, Southern Greenland, the Canadian Maritimes; a sea-road linking ancient settlements, travelled for centuries.' Well, I can tick off the first five of those as visited (Orkney I've been to twice) as well as the Canadian Maritimes, while Shetland, Faroe and Iceland remain on the must see list, so I think somewhere or other I must have had a love of northerly islands bred into me as well! She sounds like a woman after my own heart in other ways as well: of the seven cardboard cartons which she packs up for her family's new life, three contain books and one is almost all food, Rekyavik's supermarkets being lacking in choice and hugely expensive. (Although I have to admit that I could live for a year without the preserved lemons, three kinds of paprika and dried lime leaves that find their way into her carton of food essentials.)Names for the Sea is very much a book of two halves. The first half, while Moss and her family were expecting to be living in Iceland for a period of at least several years, is a consideration of the cultural differences between Iceland and the UK (and the rest of Europe in general) experienced by Moss and her family, and in particular her reactions to them (which are more thoughtful than is frequently found in books of this type). And there are a lot of cultural differences, with food being particularly problematic. On the evidence of this book, Iceland does not seem to be a country that gives food a lot of thought at all. While in theory Moss wants to try as many as possible of Iceland's traditional dishes in practice, delicacies such as charred sheep's heads fail to win her over in practice:'If you look into the meat section of an Icelandic supermarket, burnt sheep's heads will look back at you, milky eyeballs projecting out of brown skulls. Apparently they come cut in half, so you don't have to saw through the skull at home. Max wants us to buy one. I am pretending I don't think Tobias has eaten sheep's brains at nursery. Icelanders regard this as an easy week night supper and my students are amused by my horror. You eat lambs' legs, they say, why not the head? They are right - I can see that it's moral as well as logical to eat the whole once you've killed it - but I'm still not going to touch one, much less take it home and scoop its brains out'By the second half of the book, Moss and her husband have come to the conclusion that financially Iceland is not viable for them as a long term home, and the tone of the book changes, becoming less of a personal response to adapting to a new culture and more of a travelogue. This certainly contains some interesting parts, but for me loses the personal nature of the first half of the book. 

[jkdavies · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

whoo! last one of the year & hitting the target :)
Interesting anecdote about a teachers year in Iceland, and the alienation of being a foreigner, recognising the apathy that sets in so you go no further than the known routes...

[dramman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Travel memoir, perfectly well written but describing a somewhat odd society in Iceland, making it seem rather unattractive - though it is a wonderful country in my experience, well worth a visit.

[jbd1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Came highly recommended by a friend who spent a year in Iceland as a book I ought to read before I go there for the first time. It's simply a wonderful book. Anecdotal, for sure, and I've no doubt that the author didn't have a totally generalizable experience, but it's a lovely read and gave me some very useful hints and tips to think about.

[imyril · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An engaging narrative style and a candid sharing of the author's shortcomings make this an enjoyable introduction to living in Iceland as a foreigner (with a telling glance at the English middle class psyche). Having grown up as a foreigner abroad (in Europe), I occasionally wanted to shake Moss for her English reticence with language (and hence integration) and her failure to truly explore the island, but as a mature Englisher I had to admire her determination to seek out strangers to learn their stories. A fascinating counterpoint to the guidebooks, conscious of its flaws even if uncertain what those flaws may be. Not to be read as gospel.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating memoir of the author’s experience living in Reykjavík, Iceland, with her husband and two young sons. She moved from England in 2009 to take a job teaching 19th century British literature at the University of Iceland. This book provides detailed accounts of what it is like to be a newcomer (which she and the Icelandic people call “foreigner”) to Iceland and how her family adapted. She also covers the weather, landscape, food, recreation, customs, traditions, and cultural norms of the country.

Moss includes elements of history that may be new to some readers. She arrived in Iceland just after the financial collapse of 2008, known as the kreppa. She describes the “Pots and Pans Revolution” and the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in April 2010, which disrupted air travel and became global news.

She beautifully describes watching the aurora borealis with her son: “The sea is rough after the last storm, refracting oblongs of lime and violet framed by white foam, and the upper half of the world is festooned with light, swaying in figures and swathes that remind me one minute of a crowd of ball gowns hanging to dry, the next of searchlights coming from above.” She relates the pros and cons of living in a location that experiences half year of continuous light followed by a half year of darkness.

Moss is an engaging writer and does not shy away from describing her own shortcomings, such as not being willing to speak English to locals, while not being confident enough in her ability to converse in Icelandic. Luckily, her young sons learn the language quickly and can interpret for her. She also candidly discusses her struggles to fit into the local customs, such as allowing her children outside unsupervised in a rugged terrain. She inserts a bit of self-deprecating humor along the way.

The author takes time to get to know the people of Iceland through interactions, questioning, and interviews. The result is a pleasing combination of her own experiences and perspectives from residents. For example, she visits various people that share information about the country’s myths and legends, including elves, hidden people, and Yule Lads. In fact, some may be surprised to learn “the Department of Transportation consults mediums who speak to the hidden people.”

Even though Moss and her family encountered a few obstacles, she treats her subject with respect, and it is obvious how much she enjoyed living there. She spent most of her time in Reykjavík and went back later to travel to more remote places. This book goes beyond a typical travel memoir. It provides an empathetic and insightful exploration of this unique country.

[zeljanamaricferli · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I love Sarah Moss and I've never been to Iceland, even though I'd love to go, so I was really excited to read this. Unlike the travel books by bold, independent travellers, this book has a different perspective - a middle-aged British professor moving to Iceland with her family following a teenage trip when she fell in love with the country.

But, I honestly wonder: how is it possible that in the age of google people really go somewhere for a year and do not do the research. Even if I haven't been to Iceland, I was surprised Moss didn't know about some of the things about Iceland that seem to be pretty pedestrian "common knowledge". I am not sure if that is just a literary device to make this whole experience sound more novel or genuine proof of how much people do get isolated in their "ivory towers". It seemed more the latter, and many of the remarks the author makes were kind of detached and "classist".

What is unique is that Sarah Moss, similar to her fiction, has this sombre, intellectual approach to cultural adaptation and being "a stranger in a strange land". Her year abroad is not a light-hearted, humorous adventure. She digs deep into the topics that fascinate her (the amount of detail makes this a tedious read at times), but there is this constant undertone of anxiety throughout the book.

What I found disappointing was that there was very little (if any) magic of moving to a new and strange place, especially the one like Iceland. I didn't feel that spark anywhere and this whole experience seemed to be more like a year of merely surviving and just dealing with the "weirdness" of the local folk.

The last quarter or so of the book was a little bit more joyful but too late to change the overall feel. It wasn't a bad read, but I simply expected something else.