I’m about two-thirds of the way through the seven-hour drive from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður and the term “Nordic blue” is starting to make sense. Through lashing rain, the narrow road twists and turns around the coastline of Iceland’s Westfjords. Waterfalls hurtle down hillsides as the storm rages and snippets of Icelandic conversation float solemnly from the radio. At a rare hotel along the way, I have to be towed by kind strangers with a forklift truck after getting stuck in a car park. By the time I emerge from the six-mile-long Westfjords tunnel – a dimly lit, low-ceilinged single lane through a mountain – and see the lights of the town up ahead, I feel as if my state of mind has fundamentally altered.
Like much of Ísafjörður – which is surrounded by mountains and lies on a fjord across the Denmark Strait from Greenland – the tunnel is immediately recognisable from the pages of Satu Rämö’s Hildur series, a wildly successful publishing phenomenon that has put the genre of “Nordic blue” on Europe’s literary map.
