She is ten years old and is about to embark on her first adventure – a plane trip to visit her grandparents in Norway – at a time when, in the 1970s, “only flight attendants and politicians traveled abroad from Iceland.” Long summer holidays in the “hot” south, near Stavanger, where – unlike Iceland – there are trees and men in shorts, and soon new friends. “Grandma and Grandpa. Two words that can comfort a person like religion, like a huge pine tree.”

It is not often that two books by the same author, whose original editions are separated by more than twenty years, complement each other so rare, strange, and interestingly, and illuminate each other, as is the case with The Yellow Submarine (2022, in our country 2024, Artforum) and Everything About Redwoods and Time (2001, published in Slovakia in 2025, Artforum) by Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson. The Slovak translations are only a year apart, so readers of both books will be able to enjoy the connection. The Yellow Submarine was more comprehensive, and its most charming part was the recollection of the summers spent high up in the north with his stepmother's family. The narrator of The Redwood Trees is also a little boy, this time spending his holidays with his grandmother and grandfather in Norway. However, this is not an “ordinary” book about childhood; it is elevated by Stefánsson into a poetic essay about the passage of time, birth and death, and the vital need to have someone to lean on so that we don't fall. The sequoia, the largest tree species in the world, is perfect for this.