A stranger in a strange land

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, by Sarah Moss, Granta, RRP£14.99, 368 pages

In 2009, the novelist Sarah Moss took a year-long job in Iceland, drawn by memories of a magical holiday spent there with a friend when she was 19.

However, the country’s banks had collapsed the previous autumn, and in the week she accepts the post, lecturing on Romantic poetry at the University of Iceland, the value of her salary drops by a third.

Signs of the boom years are everywhere: Moss, her husband and their two young sons rent an apartment in an otherwise empty and unfinished luxury development in an upmarket area of Reykjavik; everyone drives a new SUV; there are no second-hand shops. But it is the people and landscape that make a real impression.

Names for the Sea is a beautifully written and acutely observed examination of being an útlendingur – a foreigner. A stranger in a strange land, Moss grapples with new foods, customs and landscapes that are both oddly familiar and wildly alien in this absorbing memoir.