Red Milk

'A book like a blade of light searching out and illuminating the darkest corners of history . . . It's vivid unputdownable alive and written with unerring artfulness and subtlety.' Neel Mukherjee

Gunnar Kampen grows up in Iceland during the Second World War in a household fiercely opposed to Hitler and Nazism. At nineteen he seems set for a conventional dutiful life. And yet in the spring of 1958 he founds a covert anti-Semitic nationalist party a cause that will take him on a clandestine mission to England from which he never returns.

Inspired by one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that was formed in Iceland in the 1950s Sjón's portrait of an ardent fascist is as thought-provoking as it is disturbing. As this taut and fascinating novel suggests the seeds of extremism can be hard to detect - and the ideology of the far-right remains dangerously potent.