A majestic fictional evocation of the Norse arrival in the New World,
from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central
The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and
bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves.
The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the
wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call "Vinland the
Good." The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered
iron and still see themselves as part of nature.
As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two
peoples--and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous
rivalry brings frost into paradise--he creates a tour-de-force of
speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation
myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly
original vision of our continent and its past.