10 Best Icelandic Books to Read Before Visiting Iceland

Icelandic books reveal the country long before you land: its sagas, its crime fiction, its humor, and the hard winters that shaped how people live. These picks come from Birgitta Björg Jónsdóttir, an Icelander on the Arctic Adventures team in Reykjavík who has read most of them since school. The list runs from a Nobel Prize-winning classic to a thriller you shouldn't read alone in a remote cabin. Here's what to read first, and why each one earns a place in your bag before you arrive.

Reading Icelandic books before a trip gives you context that the scenery alone can't. Books about Iceland set in lava fields, fishing villages, and Reykjavík streets show how people adapted to isolation, hard weather, and a landscape that rarely sits still. You arrive understanding the human side of the country, not just its waterfalls and glaciers.

Iceland also has one of the strongest reading cultures anywhere. Guinness World Records lists Iceland as the country with the most published writers per capita: roughly one in ten Icelanders publishes a book in their lifetime. Reykjavík has been a UNESCO City of Literature since 2011, and storytelling has shaped Icelandic identity since the medieval sagas, making Icelandic literature less a pastime than a way of seeing the world.

How Iceland Changed the World is a non-fiction history of how one small island shaped events far beyond its shores. Egill Bjarnason, an Icelandic journalist who reports for the Associated Press, traces Iceland's role in moments as varied as the French Revolution, the Apollo moon landings, the founding of Israel, and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir becoming the world's first democratically elected female president. Read it first for the background that makes the Icelandic novels on this list, and the country itself, easier to understand.

Iceland's 1975 women's strike, known as Kvennafrídagurinn, brought the country to a standstill and led to its first gender-equality law the next year.

Independent People is the classic that defines Icelandic literature, and a key reason Halldór Laxness won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Icelander ever to do so. The novel follows Bjartur, a stubborn sheep farmer who chases independence at almost any cost, across the hardship of early-20th-century rural Iceland. Slow and uncompromising, it ranks among the most honest portraits of the old Icelandic spirit you'll find.

I Remember You, published in Icelandic as Ég man þig in 2010, is the pick for readers who want Icelandic horror with a real sense of place. Yrsa Sigurðardóttir weaves two chilling stories: three friends renovating a house in the abandoned village of Hesteyri, on the edge of the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve in Iceland's remote Westfjords, and a doctor across the fjord investigating an elderly woman's death. The two threads collide, and the isolation does the rest. A 2017 film adaptation followed, but the novel is scarier. You can visit the setting yourself: our day tour to Hesteyri village crosses by boat from Ísafjörður.

Secrets of the Sprakkar looks at Iceland through the women who shaped it, from activists to artists. Eliza Reid, who served as Iceland's First Lady from 2016 to 2024, blends their stories with her own to explain how a small country became a world leader in gender equality. (Sprakkar is an old Icelandic word for extraordinary women.) Choose it for cultural insight rather than fiction.

Njáls saga is the cornerstone of medieval Icelandic literature, and the longest and most admired of the family sagas. Written in the 13th century, it follows the lawyer Njáll, his friend Gunnar, and a blood feud, sparked between their wives, that spirals through honor, revenge, and the law of the early Icelandic Commonwealth. Many of its legal battles unfold at the Alþingi, the open-air assembly that met at Þingvellir National Park from the year 930. Start here to see where Iceland's storytelling tradition began.

Reykjavík is a modern crime novel with an unusual co-author. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, who was Iceland's Prime Minister from 2017 to 2024, wrote it with best-selling crime writer Ragnar Jónasson. The case opens in 1956, when a teenage girl vanishes from the small island of Viðey off Reykjavík; thirty years later, a journalist reopens the country's most famous cold case. The book captures the city's mood while delivering classic Nordic noir. The authors' surnames, Jónasson and Jakobsdóttir, follow Iceland's patronymic naming tradition, which is why Icelanders are referred to by first name.

Names for the Sea is a memoir of moving to Iceland as an outsider. Sarah Moss, an English writer, relocated to Reykjavík with her family in 2009, just as the financial crash hit, and writes with warmth and humor about the weather, the reserve, and the fierce independence she found. Few books here are more relatable if you want to know what daily life in Iceland is actually like.

101 Reykjavík is a sharp, darkly funny look at city life, named for the postcode of central Reykjavík. Hallgrímur Helgason follows Hlynur, an aimless thirty-something still living with his mother, through nightlife, relationships, and routine in the capital. Baltasar Kormákur's 2000 film adaptation brought Hlynur to international screens.

Mýrin, published in English as Jar City, is one of the books that put Icelandic crime fiction on the world map. Arnaldur Indriðason opens with the murder of an old man in Reykjavík and lets Detective Erlendur pull a thread that runs deep into Iceland's past. Jar City was the first Erlendur novel translated into English and won the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel; the later books, including The Draining Lake, are just as strong. The dark plots stay on the page: Iceland consistently ranks as one of the safest countries in the world.

The Little Book of the Icelanders is the quickest, most enjoyable way to understand how Icelanders actually behave. Alda Sigmundsdóttir, an Icelander who returned home after years abroad, explains roughly 50 quirks of daily life and social habits with a light, wry touch. No book here is more practical for decoding the people you'll meet.

A few more books set in Iceland deserve an honorable mention. The Blue Fox by Sjón is a short, hypnotic novella that won the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson opens a poetic trilogy set in a remote fishing village.

The Woman at 1000 Degrees by Hallgrímur Helgason carries you through a turbulent century of Icelandic history in a single voice. For two more, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent reimagines the story of the last woman executed in Iceland, and Angels of the Universe by Einar Már Guðmundsson is a celebrated novel about a young man's experience of mental illness.

Birgitta has one more recommendation that you won't find in translation, and won't need to read cover to cover.

The best Icelandic books to read before visiting Iceland don't just pass the time on the plane. They hand you the country's humor, history, and hard winters before you ever see a glacier. Pick one classic, one crime novel, and one cultural read, and you'll arrive knowing the place a little from the inside. When you're ready to see it for yourself, our small-group tours lead you straight into the landscapes these stories come from.

Yes. Every book on this list except the hot-springs guide Heitar laugar á Íslandi has been translated into English, and most are easy to find as paperbacks, e-books, or audiobooks. Several share the same award-winning translators, such as Philip Roughton and Victoria Cribb. The medieval sagas, including Njáls saga, are widely available in modern English editions. Your local library or bookshop can usually order any of them.

Not all of them. Some of the most loved books about Iceland come from foreign writers. Burial Rites, a novel set in Iceland by Australian author Hannah Kent, follows Agnes Magnúsdóttir, one of the last people executed in Iceland in 1830. English writer Sarah Moss wrote about her family's year in Iceland in her memoir Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland. Icelandic authors wrote many of the essential books about the country, but an outsider's perspective can capture details that locals stop noticing.

Iceland has one of the highest rates of reading and book publishing in the world; by common estimates, about one in ten Icelanders publishes a book in their lifetime. A big reason is Jólabókaflóð, the Christmas book flood: a wave of new titles released before Christmas, with books exchanged as gifts on Christmas Eve and read the same night. The tradition dates to the 1940s, when paper was one of the few goods not rationed during the war. Long, dark winters and a thousand-year storytelling culture do the rest.

Several. Arnaldur Indriðason's Jar City became a 2006 film directed by Baltasar Kormákur, and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's I Remember You was filmed in 2017. Hallgrímur Helgason's 101 Reykjavík was adapted in 2000, also by Kormákur, and Angels of the Universe was made into an award-winning film. Reading the book first is usually the better experience.

For pure suspense, many readers start with Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's I Remember You, a ghost story even more unsettling than its 2017 film. For classic Nordic noir, Arnaldur Indriðason's Jar City is the Icelandic landmark. Reykjavík, co-written by former Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, is a strong recent cold-case mystery. Each offers a different entry point: horror, classic noir, or a political cold case. If you want more Nordic noir books after these, Indriðason's later Erlendur novels are the natural next step.

No, but even one saga adds a lot. The sagas are medieval prose stories of feuds, honor, and law among Iceland's early settlers, and they still shape how Icelanders tell stories today. Njáls saga is the longest and most celebrated, and a good single starting point. If a full saga feels like too much, a modern novel like Independent People draws on the same tradition in a more approachable way.