The Journey Home – Olaf Olafsson

WITH ITS strong narrative voice and acute observation of nature, The Journey Home immediately presents itself as an exceptional novel. Despite this, it is essentially about ordinariness. Set in the Sixties, the central character, Disa, is a mundane figure; a middle-aged Icelandic woman running an English country hotel with a good reputation for its food. There’s almost no dramatic action apart from a slow, solitary journey back home to Iceland, which she undertakes on discovering she has terminal cancer. Most of the journey is spent in a wistful reverie.

Full article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/may/06/fiction.reviews