Freyja: A Novel

“An eerie novel that will keep you up late into the night.”—Eowyn Ivey

“ Freyja tingles the senses like an incipient freeze.”—Janelle Brown

“Elegant and confident . . . Mythic and grounded.”—Victor LaValle

The unsolved case of a young girl’s disappearance reopens after twenty years in this atmospheric novel of suspense set in Reykjavík and the Icelandic coast.

Unnur has secrets. A single mother to a beloved daughter, she lives a deliberately quiet life in Reykjavík, where she works at a bakery under an assumed last name. She has spent years pushing away haunting half remembrances of the last summer of her childhood, when her otherworldly friend Freyja disappeared from a black-sand beach in the remote Dark Valley. Unnur’s safety—and her daughter’s—now hinges on discretion. Yet when her ex-husband returns to Iceland and brings with him a new girlfriend who seems to know more about Unnur than she’s letting on, Unnur may finally have to face the chilling possibility that she is responsible for her friend’s presumed death.

As a cold case investigation reopens and the intricate threads of past and present begin to tangle, Unnur must race to recover the broken memory of what happened all those years ago, or risk losing her daughter. Steeped in Icelandic folklore and myth, Freyja is at once a gripping story of a child’s disappearance, a testament to the power of a mother’s love, and an enthralling tale of redemption and forgiveness from a gifted new voice.