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Boudoir

Boudoir

by Sigrún Pálsdóttir

Original price was: £12.99.Current price is: £9.10.

Teddý lives with her parents on a farm in the Icelandic wilderness. It’s 1962, and the world is changing, although you wouldn’t know it from the stark quiet of the lava fields and mountains that mark the boundaries of the young woman’s existence. But after two chance encounters, Teddý’s dreams of a world beyond begin to crystallise, albeit in strange and unexpected ways, as we follow one woman’s life over five decades, from farm to city to the skies. Taking us from the grandeur of rural Iceland to the glossy, sticky world of 1970s air travel, via check fraud, thwarted ambition and lost astronauts, Boudoir is a novel about reinvention, dislocation, and the forceful gravity of the lives and selves we think we’ve left behind.

Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith

224pp, paperback with flaps, £12.99
ISBN: 978-1-916806-14-6
Publication date: 7 April 2026

Press & Reviews

Praise for History. A Mess.

'Pálsdóttir writes with the hand of a mystery author and the mind of a postmodernist, teasing out her protagonist’s problem while playing with literary forms, fragmenting timelines, and injecting fierce irony.’ Publishers Weekly

‘What I admire most about Pálsdóttir's writing is her ability to hide a strictly structured course of events under a gliding, occasionally deliberately (but not distractingly) chaotic style; her ability to orchestrate the random [...] and the way she covers real tensions and worries with a quilt of details, as they are so often covered in life.’ –Rein Raud, European Literature Network

About The Book

Author

Sigrún Pálsdóttir is an Icelandic writer and historian. She completed a PhD in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford in 2001, after which she was a research fellow at the University of Iceland. She was the editor of Saga, the principal peer-reviewed journal for Icelandic history, from 2008 to 2016. Pálsdóttir’s work has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, the Hagþenkir Non-fiction Prize and the DV Culture Prize. Her book Sigrún og Friðgeir (Uncertain Seas) won the Icelandic Booksellers’ Prize in 2013, and her second novel Delluferðin (Embroidery) was awarded the European Union Prize for Fiction 2021.

Translator

Lytton Smith is a poet, professor, and translator from the Icelandic. His most recent translations include works by Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Jón Gnarr, Ófeigur Sigurðsson, Bragi Ólafsson, and Guðbergur Bergsson. His most recent poetry collection, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, was published by Nightboat. Having earned his MFA and PhD from Columbia University, he currently teaches at SUNY Geneseo.

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