Hotel Silence

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, Hotel Silence is a delightful & heartwarming new novel from Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, a writer who “upends expectations” (NY Times). Told with grace, insight, and humour, this is the story of one man’s surprising mid-life adventure of self-discovery that leads him to find a new reason for being.

Jónas Ebeneser is a handy DIY kind of man with a compulsion to fix things, but he can’t seem to fix his own life. On the cusp of turning fifty, divorced, adrift, he’s recently discovered he is not the biological father of his daughter, Gudrun Waterlily, and he has sunk into an existential crisis, losing all will to live. As he visits his senile mother in a nursing home, he secretly muses on how, when, & where to put himself out of his misery.

To prevent his only daughter from discovering his body, Jónas decides it’s best to die abroad. Armed with little more than his toolbox & a change of clothes, he flies to an unnamed country where the fumes of war still hover in the air. He books a room at the sparsely occupied Hotel Silence, in a small town riddled with landmines & the aftershocks of violence, & there he comes to understand the depths of other people’s scars while beginning to see his wounds in a new light.

A celebration of life’s infinite possibilities, of transformations and 2nd chances, Hotel Silence is a rousing story of a man, a community, and a path toward regeneration from the depths of despair.