It's so long till this book is published that I don't even have a cover image but I like to write about something as soon as I've read it if I possibly can. When it is published, I'll put up an announcement and a picture on this bit of the website.

Sarah Moss wrote one of the best novels I read in 2011. Its name was NIGHT WAKING and it combined a wonderfully humorous but nevertheless uncomfortably truthful story about the hell of living with a child who doesn't sleep and a husband who doesn't really pull his weight with a mystery in the past and the depiction of one of the islands off the west coast of Scotland both now and in the nineteenth century. It was elegantly written and cleverly constructed and I loved every page of it. I looked about on the internet after I'd finished it to find out more about the writer and to my surprise I discovered that she was none other than the daughter of someone I used to know in Manchester back in the 1970s and 80s. She's about the same age as my elder daughter and her mother and I belonged to something called the National Housewives Register back in the days before Mumsnet when women gathered to have coffee at one another's houses and did reciprocal babysitting too. Having loved NIGHT WAKING I then read Sarah's first novel, COLD EARTH and found that that was great as well. I wrote about both books on my old website and that led to Granta sending me an early proof of this memoir, for which I'm most grateful.

No one at Granta can have known this, I don't think, but I am very interested in Iceland. Long before Steig Larsson swept all before him with his Lisbeth Salander novels, I was reading thrillers by a wonderful Icelandic writer called Arnaldur Indridasson.* In every one of his books he brings to life a country that is like ours in many ways and also quite unlike. Erlendur , a really beautiful creation, is a detective who has problems with his children, as well as a terrible tragedy in his past and he has to deal with crimes both current and historical. The first book I read, THE SILENCE OF THE GRAVE, went right back to a crime committed during the Second World War. Being an Indridasson fan, I went to see the movie JAR CITY and was struck by the strangeness of the landscape. I am, therefore, exactly the target audience for Moss's book.

But others will be fascinated too, to learn something about a place which not many people seems to have given much thought to, before the collapse of the Icelandic banks and the bad behaviour of a volcano. I am not going even to attempt a spelling but you know the one I mean: the one which held up all kinds of air traffic, including Sarah Moss's plane that was to take her to an interview for a job at a Singapore university. The fact that she now teaches in Cornwall instead is due in large measure to volcanic interference.

She tells us she's always been drawn to the Northern lands. When she was much younger, she and a friend visited Iceland as tourists during the summer. This would be different. She was going with her husband and two small children. She was going to teach English literature at the University. She'd be spending a whole year there, including long months in a land of almost total winter darkness.

The book is an account of that year and reading it is as exciting as reading a novel. You see the country through her eyes. You learn about the supermarkets and the scarily unstable ground under the whole country. You meet the students and the lecturers. You go where Moss goes. You hold your breath while Icelandic drivers do their terrifying thing. You discover that you take fresh fruit and vegetables for granted. The financial situation is only gradually revealed and this makes the book almost like a thriller in parts. It seems for instance that many people in the middle classes don't even know that true poverty exists till they see the evidence of it with their own eyes. Several things are contradictory. We're told that it's quite normal for children to be left lying outside shops, for instance, in their prams. It's also unheard of, apparently, for anyone to harm a child. That doesn't quite square what I read in Indridasson and later on in the book, Moss discovers that in fact the crime statistics are very similar to ours in the UK. and that Iceland does experience things like, for example, domestic violence, especially under the influence of drink.

The book is absolutely crammed full of interesting experiences, and awe-inspiring sights, both natural and man made, but I liked best the chapter on knitting and the parts of the book where Moss meets women for whom elves are as real as human beings. She goes to talk to these women about the manifestations they are able to perceive in the landscape around them and her descriptions are enough to make you feel....well, a little uneasy, to say the least. The knitting chapter is completely fascinating and I am about to go onto Google to see if I can find a visual depiction of the Icelandic method of knitting which is apparently completely different from our own. In Iceland EVERYONE KNITS...at meetings,. busstops, everywhere possible. You just carry your wool and needles around with you wherever you go - a marvellous idea, I reckon.

You come away from this book with a dread of Icelandic spellings, a renewed interest in a tough, kind, practical and also very strange people with quite different ideas and priorities from ours but also a great deal in common. It's a real treat to have this account of Moss's year abroad. She and her family clearly loved their time there and she's managed to pass that magic on to us.

* I do rather wish Moss had met Indridasson. Everyone in Rejkavik does seem to know everyone else and it's an amazingly literary country so it might have happened....