by Auður Jónsdóttir
translated by Meg Matich ’15
Published by Dottir Press (2022)
Nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, Quake: A Novel is a haunting novel-in-translation about Saga, a woman who comes to on the pavement alongside a busy street to find that her three-year-old son is gone.
She’s just had a grand mal seizure—the first in years—and cannot remember what she’s doing or where she’s going. As her memory begins to return, big chunks remain mysterious. Why is her husband no longer living with her? Whose funeral flowers are on her table? Why has her mother gone missing? Desperate to piece together the fragments of her life, her declining health and frayed relationships drag her backwards in time into long-suppressed family secrets.
Hailed as Auður Jónsdóttir's best-written novel so far, Quake is a shocking and revelatory exploration of the blurred lines between fact and fiction, reality and imagination, and where mother ends and child begins.