My Yellow Submarine

" Stefánsson is a writer of great scope and imagination" RONAN HESSION, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul A middle-aged man on a bench in a London park sees Paul McCartney sitting nearby. Resolving to approach him, he puts gathers his thoughts and takes up the thread of his memories, marked by the Beatles' repertoire . . . A mother plays " Yellow Submarine" on the harmonica to her seven-year-old son. She dies and leaves a void. A few months later, the Beatles split up. Another great loss in his life. A distant father, silent and abusive doesn't help. Only when the boy finds shelter in this own yellow submarine - a room in the basement of the public library - does his life begin to take shape. From one of Europe's most compelling stylists, Yellow Submarine is a masterful and life-affirming novel that sees a boy's lonely childhood linked to timeless stories and legends, the Beatles, and the austerity of life in Iceland in the eighties. " Like fellow Scandinavian authors Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Stefánsson joins plainspoken depictions of daily life to intimations of mysticism, creating a spectral, haunted atmosphere" Wall Street Journal Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton