Lead Review (Home Before Dark)
- Book: Home Before Dark
- Location: Iceland
- Author: Eva Björg Ægisdóttir
If I could award Home Before Dark more than five out of five for its evocative setting descriptions and tense, psychological drama, I would do it! Eva Björg Ægisdóttir is a masterful storyteller, and the drama she inserts into her novels can leave you breathless. That said, this book almost disappointed me. I got to a point where I was pretty sure I knew what was going on and I just needed to plod through the remaining pages. I began to wonder why there were so many remaining pages. But of course, the author hadn’t done with me yet – there were even more twists to the plot before, wrung out, I turned the final page with a sigh of satisfaction. The book is wonderfully well translated by the expert Victoria Cribb, such that you might imagine it had been written in English to start with.
Home Before Dark has two narrators, sisters Marsibil (known as Marsi) and Kristin (Stina). Marsi tells her story in the present (which is 1977) and Kristin narrates her experiences in 1967 – the year she disappeared. Marsibil, it soon becomes apparent, is an unreliable narrator, suffering insomnia, which causes her to doubt the truth of her own memories. She has decided, as the tenth anniversary of her sister’s disappearance approaches, to return from Reykjavik to her parents’ home and to find out once and for all what became of Stina. The older girl went missing as a seventeen-year-old, on her way home after a night out. Police investigations couldn’t determine whether she had been murdered, despite evidence in the form of her bloody anorak which was discovered along her route.
Marsibil and her parents have never managed to get their lives back on track. Marsi is dismayed that they won’t discuss what happened. She looks back at the claustrophobic atmosphere of the rural Icelandic village she grew up in and feels that little has changed there either. She wonders whether, if Stina was murdered, the killer might come after her next. Fear, she feels, is like a parasite that has taken up residence in her ever since she returned to investigate. She suffers from low self-esteem and blames herself for her sister’s disappearance. Marsi had a secret, a pen pal called Bergur who she was meant to meet on the fateful night. Somehow she feels that this is related to Stina’s fate. But Marsi isn’t the only one who has secrets.
Home Before Dark is an atmospheric novel, which gives the reader a total-immersion experience of rural Icelandic life in the 1960s and 70s. The book’s characters are almost woven into the landscape. This is a novel that could only have been set in Iceland, with its unique geological features and traditions. The author sustains the tension, except where she chooses not to, then delivers the final coup de grace. Definitely a must-read for 2025!
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