Friðsemd is a comic, dystopian, grief-stricken eco-thriller about loneliness, friendship, climate catastrophe, bad corporations, pulp fiction, and the dangerous human need for stories to make sense. It is narrated by Friðsemd, an anxious older Icelandic woman living in Eskifjörður in a future where climate change has already transformed Iceland. The southern lowlands have partly sunk beneath the sea, old towns have vanished or moved uphill, and the drowned south is known as “the Lost Land.” The novel begins as a mourning story, becomes an amateur detective story, turns into corporate satire, and ends in disaster, survival and a strange kind of funeral.
Friðsemd’s life has revolved around Fatima Bergkjær, her closest friend, whom she met decades earlier when they were students in Denmark. Fatima was everything Friðsemd is not: loud, glamorous, fearless, funny, erotic, extravagant, and always ready to go somewhere. Friðsemd is cautious, nervous, solitary, and attached to routine. She translates and edits Fatima’s books into Icelandic. Fatima writes wildly popular Danish erotic crime novels about Simone Pilunnguaq Larsen, known as Advokat Larsen, a brilliant, sexy, Greenlandic-Danish lawyer who solves absurd murders while having dramatic affairs with suspects, victims, villains and witnesses. Friðsemd thinks of the books as “theirs,” not because she wrote them, but because she helped shape, translate and care for them. Through the Advokat Larsen books, she and Fatima share an imaginary world.
Then Friðsemd receives an email from Lærke, Fatima’s literary agent, saying that Fatima has died in an accident. She apparently fell into the sea from a viewing platform in the cliffs near Hveragerði. Friðsemd opens a final email from Fatima, written just before her death. Fatima had been travelling in the Faroes, then arrived in Hveragerði, looking out over the Lost Land. She writes that she will come to Friðsemd after the weekend and jokes that Friðsemd must have port wine ready and good stories to tell her. Friðsemd has bought the port, of course, but now must drink it alone.
