The Ice-Shirt

Name: The Ice-Shirt
Rating: 4.3 (31 reviews)

by William T. Vollmann Book 1 in the Seven Dreams series.

Amazon

3.8(31)

In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, Norse settlers move west from Iceland to Greenland and then towards the coastlands they call Vinland. The narrative draws on the Icelandic sagas while treating migration as an encounter between incompatible understandings of land, kinship and the supernatural. Freydís Eiríksdóttir and Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir emerge as rival centres of the story, each carrying a different vision of what the new country might become.

Vollmann combines speculative history, Inuit creation narratives and a modern traveller’s awareness of the Arctic landscape. The familiar saga of exploration becomes a darker study of colonisation: hunger, feud, sexuality and fear shape the Norse settlements, while Indigenous communities confront visitors whose iron weapons and possessive ideas of territory threaten an older relationship with the natural world.