Night Watch (1990)

[Night Watch] is a book that has no equal in recent Icelandic literature.

Beautiful, terrifying and enchanting family saga about six generations of Icelandic women.

... this really is a first-class novel, dealing with the role of women in Iceland over the years but also how we come to terms with our family and our past as well as with who we think we are. ... a really excellent novel, which tells of the three night vigil of Nina, who is watching her mother die. While she is watching, she thinks of her own life and her relationships with her family and lovers but, more particularly, she thinks of her forebears, primarily the female ones. ... Sigurdardottir writes superbly and tells her stories very well ...

The book does not attempt to give the illusion that we can fully understand our ancestors’ reality: it questions while also being experimental. In this book, Frida A. Sigurdardottir lyrically describes our need for history and narrates and illustrates how difficult it is to trace a single truth about life and art.

The novel is innovative, but retains a poetic beauty … Frida A. Sigurdardottir describes in a lyrical style our need for history and narratives, and exposes the difficulty of achieving an unequivocal expression of life and art.