"A dystopian novel that feels like it could be happening today, where women who either can’t or won’t carry their own pregnancies rent the wombs of a hand-picked cohort of gestational surrogates, who spend their nine months being closely monitored in a posh resort that’s like Canyon Ranch meets the panopticon. The story follows Jane, a poor surrogate from the Philippines, desperate to obtain a better life for her daughter, and the women around her, from the older nanny who hooks her up with the gig to the wealthy young striver who dreamed up the business to a fellow surrogate who has reasons of her own for participating in the project. Nobody’s motives are pure and, when one of the surrogates threatens to expose the Farm, it turns out that the business of surrogacy is as complicated as motherhood itself."

"Set in Reykjavík at the turn of the 20th century this novel has a Chaplin-esque quality in its celebration of how the good values of society are to be found among those clinging to its lowest rung. Álfgrímur is an orphan living with an old couple who have opened their small farm to the misfits and the meek. A nearby graveyard becomes the boy’s playground, and it is there he is discovered to have “the pure tone” while singing at funerals of the lost and lonesome. From their gravesides he goes into the world to become a singer. It is my favorite book by Laxness, not least because it is his attempt to understand why someone like himself, born in a town of 10,000 people, found the right melody to transform the stories of a small world into world literature."