Red Milk

Reviews / Votes

Sjon's policy of omission-of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind-results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting. * Asymptote Journal * A slim forensic novel to strike a chill. * Saga * Sjon's prose is appropriately sharp and precise, illuminating the murky corners of his topic. -- Pippa Bailey * New Statesman * This is a landscape proper to a child's imagination, dreamlike but solid, with all the pronounced lucidity and wild agency that objects and colors assume . . . Sjon makes us think again about what empathy can - and frequently enough simply can't - achieve. -- Erica Banks * 4Columns * Like Iceland itself, Sjon's books are simultaneously tiny and huge, weird and normal, ancient and modern. Reading them feels like listening to that story of the beached whale: a wild invention that is actually a straight-faced confession. His books dance - with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact - all over the line between the mythic and the mundane. -- Sam Anderson * New York Times * What Sjon leaves out of his work is as powerful as what he puts in. His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way. * David Mitchell * The chapters move like the prose equivalent of flip-book images, quick and evocative . . . Sjon's story, based on research into a real-life band of Icelandic neo-Nazis, dovetails nicely with current preoccupations about the resurgence of fascism . . . By tarrying for a while with the everyday - the ultimate site of real politics - Sjon gets at how endlessly interesting it can be, and how much it can contain and conceal. -- Peter C. Baker * New York Times Book Review *