ambition
aviation
Category=FB
Category=FBA
coming-of-age
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
feminist
glass ceiling
history
Iceland
space
state of the nation
Product details
- ISBN 9781916806146
- Dimensions: 125 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 07 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Peirene Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Teddy 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, Teddy'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.With piercing clarity and dry, unsentimental wit, Sigrun Palsdottir - historian, novelist, and one of Iceland's most compelling contemporary voices - brilliantly captures the dissonance between how we are seen and who it is we are. Taking us from 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.
Sigrun Palsdottir 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. Palsdottir's work has been nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Icelandic Women's Literature Prize, the Hagthenkir Non-fiction Prize and the DV Culture Prize. Her book Sigrun og Fridgeir (Uncertain Seas) won the Icelandic Booksellers' Prize in 2013, and her second novel Delluferdin (Embroidery) was awarded the European Union Prize for Fiction 2021.
