Olaf Olafsson

A Novel

Touch

From the critically acclaimed Olaf Olafsson, an intimate yet sweeping story of a New York neurologist and the three women who change his life An overlooked pianist who finally receives fraught success after decades of disappointment. An elusive dancer whose untimely death her fiancé is desperate to untangle. A mysterious patient who is comatose after a violent accident. These are the three women who animate Olaf Olafsson’s brilliantly rendered One Station Away. Magnus, a New York neurologist—son to one, lover to another, and doctor to a third—is the thread that binds these women’s stories together as he navigates relationships defined by compromise and misunderstanding, guilt and forgiveness, and, most of all, by an obsessive attempt to communicate—to understand and to be understood, to love and to be loved. A deeply affecting family tale, a heart-rending love story that spans the globe, and a suspenseful drama at the edge of the mystery of life and death, One Station Away is a profoundly moving story of memory, identity, and misconnection, a novel of haunting power and lasting insight.

One Station Away

The haunting, vivid story of a nun whose past returns to her in unexpected ways, all while investigating a mysterious death and a series of harrowing abuse claims A young nun is sent by the Vatican to investigate allegations of misconduct at a Catholic school in Iceland. During her time there, on a gray winter's day, a young student at the school watches the school's headmaster, Father August Franz, fall to his death from the church tower. Two decades later, the child--now a grown man, haunted by the past--calls the nun back to the scene of the crime. Seeking peace and calm in her twilight years at a convent in France, she has no choice to make a trip to Iceland again, a trip that brings her former visit, as well as her years as a young woman in Paris, powerfully and sometimes painfully to life. In Paris, she met an Icelandic girl who she has not seen since, but whose acquaintance changed her life, a relationship she relives all while reckoning with the mystery of August Franz's death and the abuses of power that may have brought it on. In The Sacrament, critically acclaimed novelist Olaf Olafsson looks deeply at the complexity of our past lives and selves; the faulty nature of memory; and the indelible mark left by the joys and traumas of youth. Affecting and beautifully observed, The Sacrament is both propulsively told and poignantly written--tinged with the tragedy of life's regrets but also moved by the possibilities of redemption, a new work from a novelist who consistently surprises and challenges.

The Sacrament

For twenty years Christian Benediktsson has led an orderly but demanding life as butler to the media magnate William Randolph Hearst, famously the inspiration for Citizen Kane, in his San Simeon castle. But Christian's own private world is filled with regret - for a family abandoned, a reckless affair and a tragic death, followed hard by financial downfall that prompted his profound retreat from life. But when one day Christian's buried past threatens to catch up with him, a heart-rending journey of self-discovery into lost love begins.

Walking into the Night

Innflytjandinn

A searing novel of love and war, betrayal and redemption. Having grown up in an exclusive circle of wealthy British ex-pats in Florence in the 1920s, Alice Orsini shocks everyone when she marries the son of a minor Italian landowner and begins restoring San Martino, a crumbling villa in Tuscany, to its former glory. But after years of hard work, filling the acres with orchards, livestock, and farmhands, Alice's growing restlessness pulls her into the heady social swirl of wartime Rome and a reckless affair that will have devastating consequences. Her indiscretion is noticed by careful eyes—those of Robert Marshall, a renowned dealer of renaissance art. In exchange for his silence, he demands Alice hide a priceless Caravaggio, a national treasure that he has sold to the Germans, at San Martino. As the front creeps toward Tuscany, sending a wave of orphans, refugees, and wounded Allies to San Martino, Alice trusts that the painting she's hiding will keep the Germans at bay. What she doesn't know is the truth about a brilliant young artist she harbors named KristÍn, a prodigy who can restore any painting, and whose secrets may ruin them all. Trapped between loyalists and resistors, cruel German forces and Allied troops, Alice and KristÍn must withstand the destruction of everything around them while painfully confronting the consequences of their past mistakes. In this sweeping story of passion and betrayal, Olafsson works his profound magic once again, creating a novel that grapples with the moral abyss of war while rendering the psychological portraits of those living through it with masterful strokes.

Restoration

Walking Into the Night

Geceye Yürümek

As butler to William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon castle, Christian Benediktsson lives quietly, almost invisibly. He completes his tasks efficiently and with aplomb, catering to the whims of the volatile Chief and overseeing the running of the hectic household. Privy to the goings-on of the celebrity guests who visit as well as to Hearst’s intimate relationship with his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, he is the picture of discretion. An extremely private man, those around him know nothing of him or his life. And so it is in his thoughts and in unsent letters to his wife back in Iceland that we witness the unraveling of his former life, which began when he abandoned her and their children for an actress in New York City. Once a successful businessman, he erases his past and himself after a sudden tragic death and his financial ruin, the result of a jilted lover’s vengeance. Walking into the Night is a stunning portrait of a man wrestling with guilt and secret passions.

A haunting selection of twelve thematically connected short stories examines the complexity and changing quality of modern-day human relationships over the course of time, as he explores the lives of a lustful photographer who confronts his own mortality, a father who tries to transform his new lover into his late wife, and other characters. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Stories

Valentines

For years, Disa has lived a quiet life, managing an English country-house hotel with her companion Anthony. However, upon learning that she is terminally ill, Disa decides it is time to travel back to the village in Iceland where she was born. Olaf Olafsson takes the reader with Disa on her quietly heroic journey as she heads north, seeking a resolution to painful matters she has spent most of her life trying to forget.

The Journey Home

Peter Peterson, an Icelandic expatriate living in New York, is racked by nightmares about a crime of passion he may have committed a half-century before out of an unrequited love. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Olaf Olafsson

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