Named one The 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Esquire Winner of the 2005 Nordic Council Literature Prize―the Nordic world's highest literary honor― Sjón's The Blue Fox is part mystery, part fairy tale, and the perfect introduction to a mind-bending, world-class literary talent. Set against the stark backdrop of the Icelandic winter, an elusive, enigmatic fox leads a hunter on a transformative quest. At the edge of the hunter's territory, a naturalist struggles to build a life for his charge, a young woman with Down syndrome whom he had rescued from a shipwreck years before. By the end of Sjón's slender, spellbinding fable of a novel, none of their lives will be the same. In January 1883 in Iceland, “Everything . . . is blue.” Rural pastor Baldur Skuggason hunts a fox for its pelt, which he will sell to supplement his meager income. The herbalist Fridrik B. Fridjonsson is completing a hoax on Baldur that has allowed him, Herb-Fridrik, to bury his longtime assistant, who had Down syndrome, with more reverence than the grumpy, prejudiced minister ever could show. A flashback showing how Herb-Fridrik met his helper completes the action of this short novel by poet and pop-music lyricist (most famously for Iceland’s international star, Björk) Sjón. The tale is tinged by metamorphoses, however, of animal into human and vice versa, and it is written primarily in the spare, concrete diction of nature poetry—indeed, its opening section looks like a sequence of prose poems. Leavened by dry rural humor in the characters’ speech and thoughts, it is magnetically readable. See also The Whispering Muse. --Ray Olson “When I need something epic and lyrical I call upon Sjón . . . The Blue Fox is a magical novel.” ― Björk “ The Blue Fox describes its world with brilliant, precise, concrete colour and detail . . . Comic and lyrical.” ― A. S. Byatt, The Times (London) “Enchantingly poetic . . . Spellbinding . . . Magical . . . Exceptional . . . Require[s] that one use the loose descriptive ‘thriller' too.” ― Nuruddin Farah, The Independent Born in Reykjavík in 1962, Sjón is the author of the novels The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, From the Mouth of the Whale, Moonstone, and CoDex 1962 , for which he won several awards, including the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize and the Icelandic Literary Prize. He has also been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and his work has been translated into thirty-five languages. In addition, Sjón has written more than seven poetry collections, several opera librettos, and lyrics for various artists, including Björk. He was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in Dancer in the Dark , and he cowrote the script of the film The Northman with its director, Robert Eggers. In 2017 he became the third writer – following Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell – to contribute to Future Library, a public artwork based in Norway spanning one hundred years. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.