A book tour in the land of lava and tin houses
If you ever fly to Iceland from Europe, be sure to book yourself into a window seat on the right-hand side of the aeroplane. Your first view of Iceland will be unforgettable. My first landing at Keflavík airport was in the autumn of 1995. My debut novel, a financial thriller entitled Free To Trade , had been published in January that year to an acclaim which was both satisfying and bewildering. I was lucky: it was the right book at the right time for the publishing world, and the following twelve months exploded in the competing demands of a frenzy of publicity and a contractual requirement to sit down and write a second book. I received invitations from foreign publishers to travel to Australia, the United States, France, Norway, Denmark, Holland. And Iceland. I was urged by my agent to accept most of these invitations, but I didn’t really have to go to Iceland. Although its population are avid readers, there are only three hundred thousand of them; it’s scarcely an ...