If you want to read Halldor Laxness, skip Independent People for awhile and read this. You will find lovely, poignant descriptions of nature and people and how one place so deeply affects its inhabitants. The story is a light read, but it also contains deeper currents and gives a charming personality and distinctiveness to a place, a home.

This book is chick lit taken to a new level. The beginning introduces the concept of the time capsule and its relevance to the story is threaded throughout: this is the story of a family in different generations, all strung together by one narrator who recalls various parts of her and her family members’ lives. The remarkable element of this book is its profound prose and how it illustrates at once the arbitrariness and importance of time and how seemingly random events craft the meat of one’s life. Karin Blom, the narrator, is able to reclaim her story vis a vis transposing others’ journeys and stories onto her own narratives. In the end, the big questions are not answered; no great meaning in life is discovered; in fact, there is not even a plot, per se. And that is the point: this story is a time capsule, a celebration and a heart-wrenching criticism of how society crafts meaningfulness, and at once extraordinarily personal and autobiographical and universal. One can relate to it because its specifics resonate with anyone who has experienced a family being torn apart in any manner. Linn Ullmann really knows how to capture the human experience.