Opening with a graphic scene of oral sex and closing with penetrating philosophical questions, Moonstone is quite a ride. Its hero, Máni Steinn, is a lost and lonely boy in Reykjavik. As the Spanish Flu spreads through the city and the first World War plays out in Europe, he performs sexual favours for local men in secret for the price of a ticket to the cinema, his place of refuge and joy. We see the city through erotic moments, peculiar vignettes and elegiac memory; the book reads like a silent film, dreamlike and fragmentary.

Winner of the Icelandic Bookseller’s Novel of the Year, Moonstone teases the intellect without self-consciousness, and asks the big questions while remaining playful. The bare prose and explicit scenes contrast with the poetic geometry of the whole, the delicate, unlaboured prism of metaphor which the reader unwittingly inhabits. By the story’s last act, we wonder about the fictions we rely upon to understand the world, to make sense of the roles we play.