by Vi Keeland
First published 2025
Iðunn is exhausted. She has been exhausted for a long time. She sits in doctor's offices and describes her symptoms and gets sent home. Her friends suggest vitamins. Her family suggests exercise. She tries all of it. The step-counting watch was just one more attempt to find an answer. Then she wakes up one morning and the watch shows she logged over 40,000 steps overnight. She has no memory of leaving her bed. She also has injuries she cannot explain. Set in contemporary Reykjavík, this novel follows Iðunn as she tries to make sense of what her body does while she sleeps. The people around her keep finding reasons not to believe her. The evidence keeps getting harder to ignore. The central tension is not just what is happening to Iðunn at night. It is the experience of being a woman whose body is doing something wrong and being told, repeatedly, that she is the problem. That gap between what she knows and what anyone will accept sits at the heart of the story.
Genres: literary-fiction, domestic-fiction, contemporary, psychological-thriller, mystery-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, haunting, introspective, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: gaslighting, isolation, medical-mystery, unreliable-reality
Setting: Reykjavík, Iceland
Period: contemporary
272 pages · Paperback · Bramble
Content warnings: gaslighting, medical-trauma, mental-illness