“What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive” – so said Sir Walter Scott, but it could all too easily be the subtitle for Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s Home Before Dark.
A standalone novel, separate from Ægisdóttir’s Forbidden Iceland series, Home Before Dark takes readers on a decade-long journey of lies, family secrets, and regret.
In rural Iceland, two sisters seem polar worlds apart. Stina, the elder sister, seemingly has it all – popular, stylish, and a burgeoning, talented artist. Younger sister Marsi has much to live up to and so adopts her big sister’s persona to gain herself a pen pal, a decision that will come to haunt her.
When Stina vanishes on her way home from her friend’s, Marsi wonders if she’s to blame. A decade later, with the mystery of her sibling’s sudden disappearance no closer to being solved, the now 24-year-old Marsi returns to her childhood home to find her former pen pal has suddenly resumed contact.
The past decade has haunted Marsi; her mental health not helped by resorting to alcohol to dull her pain, her relationship with her parents as strained now as it was when she was a shy 14-year-old.
The small-town isolation doesn’t help her mood: a place where everyone knows everyone and gossip is rife leaves little room for individuality. Yet conversely, in a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, nobody is saying anything about the disappearance of Stina.
As fact merges with fiction, evidence vanishes, and Marsi begins to doubt her own reality, a body turns up on the frozen roadside that makes her begin to wonder what really happened to her sister a decade before – and if she was unwittingly to blame.
Ægisdóttir’s previous works have shown her to be a master storyteller, adept at juggling multiple storylines across interweaving timelines, and that skill is clearly evident here. Switching between 1967 and 1977, we’re given glimpses into the past that help define the present. Decades-old family secrets, slowly revealed, add darkness and depth to the mystery, with pain from long-buried events continuing to haunt the family years later.
Ægisdóttir also delves deep into the human mind, exploring grief and the tricks it plays on us. What is real and what is a conjured figment of a tortured, grieving soul is cleverly explored. There are no easy answers here, however. The characters are flawed, and the resolution – served with the requisite page-turning twists by Ægisdóttir – doesn’t give all the answers. There is an ending, but whether it’s a happy one, or the right one, is very much left to the reader to decide.
Victoria Cribb’s translation keeps the pace brisk and the atmosphere taut, and in Home Before Dark Eva Björg Ægisdóttir continues to show why she is one of Iceland’s most captivating and thrilling authors.
Home Before Dark by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, translated by Victoria Cribb, is published by Orenda Books.
