Independent PeopleIndependent People

Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and deeply comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumored to be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks of sheep unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to him, and what ensues is an epic battle of wills. Set in Iceland in the early twentieth century.