Lead Review

• Book: Names for the Sea
• Location: Iceland
• Author: Sarah Moss

Names for the Sea is Moss’s memoir of her family s first year in Iceland, a journey from southern England to the nether reaches of the North Pole, and it is quite a ride. In fact, it s one of the most enjoyable travel books I ve read … What I was thrilled to read was the mundane oddness … It s hilarious in its unexpectedness, more like a dispatch from Gulliver than A Year in Provence … This is a work of humour, for sure, and I loved her puncturing of Icelanders tales of derring-do, the obsession with pride and shame. More than that, it s a work of strange intelligence that jars like poetry. So many passages made me pause, to long to read her two novels … Moss does eventually return, and Iceland is so odd it instantly starts to feel for her fictional . I feel the same about this book: it has beauty enough to feel fictional –The Times

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