
Boudoir
Peirene Press Ltd
Will be published approx. on 7. April 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
978-1-916806-14-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'What I admire most about Palsdottir's writing is her ability to orchestrate the random [...] and the way she covers real tensions and worries with a quilt of details, as they are so often covered in life.'- Rein Raud, European Literature Network
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
214 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-916806-14-6 (9781916806146)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Person
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 Hag?enkir Non-fiction Prize and the DV Culture Prize. Her book Sigrun og Fri?geir (Uncertain Seas) won the Icelandic Booksellers' Prize in 2013, and her second novel Dellufer?in (Embroidery) was awarded the European Union Prize for Fiction 2021.
Translation