The Raven's Nest: An Icelandic Journey Through Light and Darkness

This Yuletide, take a moment for yourselves to hear Sarah talk about and read from The Raven’s Nest, her ecological memoir set in Iceland’s otherworldly Westfjords – while doing your Christmas handiwork.

This beautifully vivid and lyrical memoir is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption. It explores belonging, chance encounters and how we relate to time, each other, and the living world.

The event takes inspiration from the Icelandic tradition of ‘kvöldvaka’ (‘evening wake’). On farms in the short winter days, evening thoughts and hands turned to the indoor work of the making and repair of clothing, tools, utensils. Gathered in a single room, someone would read aloud to the household while they did this. In this spirit, you are invited to bring along any quiet handiwork – for example knitting, mending, whittling, sketching, last minute Christmas gift making – to do while Sarah reads. Or just sit back and enjoy an evening of conversation.

In Iceland, it is also tradition to gift one another books at Christmas and spend part of the day reading together. The run up to Christmas sees the Jólabókaflóð, (‘Yule Book Flood’) where a whole nation shops for Christmas gift books. We are thrilled to be bringing both of these Icelandic traditions to Verey Books.

“The Raven’s Nest is A deeply thoughtful, vivid, enquiring, genre-traversing book, closely attentive to the people and the landscapes with which it dwells. It asks hard questions – and offers no easy answers – about what it means to belong to a place, and to live well upon a part of the earth. Sarah’s writing – crisp in its details, patient in its rhythms – draws its readers northwards and inwards upon a fascinating journey.”
~ Robert Macfarlane

Sarah will be signing books afterwards.