12 Women + Under the Volcano

Ordinary lives, quietly overturned. Nothing is as stable as it seems. Svava Jakobsdóttir is one of Iceland’s most original and influential writers, known for her spare prose, surreal twists, and unflinching gaze at the pressures—both social and psychological—shaping women’s lives. Under the Volcano collects three decades of short fiction that moves between domestic realism, bureaucratic absurdity, and sudden moments of eerie transformation. The stories often begin in the familiar—a Reykjavík apartment, a strained marriage, a quiet dinner—and slide, almost imperceptibly, into the uncanny. Mountains appear indoors, houses vanish, time slips. Yet at the heart of each story is a precise exploration of how cultural expectations press in on the self, and how quietly those pressures distort identity. Whether dramatizing the impossibility of selflessness, the absurdity of political life, or the fluid nature of memory, Jakobsdóttir’s stories resist easy interpretation and reward close attention. Collected here in English for the first time, Under the Volcano reveals a fiercely intelligent writer whose unsettling, darkly elegant work continues to shape the landscape of Icelandic fiction.