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Absolution
1996 Nominated

Absolution

Olafur Olafsson

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ABOUT
THE BOOK

In his dazzling literary debut in the English language, Olafur Johann Olafsson – one of Iceland’s preeminent and best-selling writers of fiction – gives us the putative memoirs of an Icelandic expatriate living in New York in the autumn of his life, a degenerate, self-styled captain of industry and aesthete who has endured two failed marriages and whose children are “a testimony to a mistake.”
Peter Peterson is a man racked by nightmares of a crime of passion he may have committed half a century ago out of unrequited love, a crime that has shaped the rest of his life. His memoirs – a confession ranging from his placid bourgeois boyhood in Reykjavik, to his days as a student in Nazi-occupied Denmark, to his ferocious rise as an immigrant entrepreneur in New York – are refracted not only through his paranoia, manipulativeness, vanity, crazed cynicism, and wry humour, but also through the sensibility of a compulsive fellow countryman who has translated and edited Peterson’s scribblings in the settling of Peterson’s estate – and who might have made them very much his own.
Sly, highly intelligent, and lucid, Absolution is a brilliant anatomy of obsession, desire, and self-deception.
Olafur Olafsson

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Olafur
Olafsson

Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien Scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of three previous novels, The Journey Home, Absolution and Walking Into the Night, and a story collection, Valentines. His books have been published to critical acclaim in more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of the O. Henry Award and the Icelandic Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and has twice been nominated for the IMPAC Award. He is the Executive Vice President of Time Warner and he lives in New York City with his wife and three children.
Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien Scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of three previous novels, The Journey Home, Absolution and Walking Into the Night, and a story collection, Valentines. His books have been published to critical acclaim in more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of the O. Henry Award and the Icelandic Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize, and has twice been nominated for the IMPAC Award. He is the Executive Vice President of Time Warner and he lives in New York City with his wife and three children.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
USA
Author
Olafur Olafsson
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Nominating Library
Borgarbókasafn Reykjavíkur / Reykjavík City Library - Iceland

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