FIRST COMES SUMMER

A brother and sister’s incestuous relationship becomes something even stranger in this novel set in Viking times.

Folkví and Áslakr were born into a prominent family in an isolated coastal village sometime during the great Viking era of trade and exploration. Folkví trains with her mother to become the area’s völva, a kind of seer responsible for acting as a mediator between the world of men and that of the gods. Meanwhile, Áslakr is thought to be one of “the most promising of all the children in the headman’s yard,” sure to become an important member of the expedition crews who travel far down the coast in search of new trading ports. But when the siblings’ parents both die suddenly after a brief illness, Folkví and Áslakr are forced to navigate their adult roles before they are fully prepared, including their first sexual experimentations, which they undertake with each other. With Áslakr gone for the winter months on his first expedition, Folkví begins a relationship with the darkly magnetic Od, a stranger from outside the village, but when Áslakr returns betrothed, all the formidable force of Folkví’s concentration turns to her obsessive quest to keep her brother for herself. The book is narrated from both siblings’ perspectives—Folkví’s section set in the summer of her brother’s betrothal and Áslakr narrating from many years later as he looks back on the life that followed his marriage. While there is a marked difference between the ways they interpret the world, the constant thread of delight in the natural world’s magic and awe in the face of its total domination of mortal lives weaves through every sentence of the sublimely described setting. This is so well achieved that the slender chapter bridging the period that passes between the siblings’ stories—told from the perspective of Urd, one of the three Norn sisters who weave the threads of human lives from their land beyond mortal time—serves to underscore the reality of their mystic lives rather than excuse or explain the novel’s forays into mythological fantasy.

A magical book about love and death and the slender, enduring line that connects the two.