In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.

The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open, the restaurant serves thirteen-course dinners from centuries past, and the doors of the guest rooms have been salvaged from demolished opera houses. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavoured schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself.
Fantastic, I had a really hard time putting my Kindle down to do my Adult responsibilities.

This is a very strange book, but in the best possible way. A married couple, always named “the man” and “the woman”, gets to a remote Nordic and unnamed town in order to collect the child they’re going to adopt. The woman is very sick and they both want to become parents before she dies. As soon as they reach the town, weird things start to happen and they begin to have strange encounters. Things change definitely when the woman meets Father Emmanuel, a kind of a healer, and she convinces herself that she’s going to recover from her terminal illness. At the same time, she starts losing interest in the child and in the journey itself.

It’s really difficult to give an idea of the plot of this book which is really strange, as I said at the beginning, but in a good way. I absolutely loved it and found its eerie atmosphere enthralling. It reminded me of Iain Reid’s “I’m thinking of ending things” for both the atmosphere and the complexity of the novel itself. It definitely wasn’t the Peter Cameron I’ve got to know with “Someday this pain will be useful to you” and this is interesting, because this book gave me an insight in the author’s ability to switch genre and to experiment with his own writing. I usually don’t like novels with unnamed characters and towns, but at this round I found this strategy convincing and well employed. Overall, a wonderful, insightful and original novel. Totally recommended.