A beautiful, wondrous book about hard lives, silence, work, death, water, fishing, farming, winter, light, ice, change— life on a small island in Norway. If you read the edition I did, pay no attention to the book’s description on the back cover. It doesn’t even touch upon the true nature of the story. There is a paragraph in the middle of the book about silence that I want to read over and over. It was a joy to read.