First Comes Summer: A Novel

Winding seamlessly between the psychological and the mythological, the spellbinding story of a young woman’s dangerous passion as it plays out over the course of an eerie summer

In their remote Viking settlement, Folkvi and her brother, Aslakr, have always been close—unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkvi learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Áslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkvi to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love.

Sick with grief, Folkvi rages to the gods where they sit at the foot of an ancient tree, contemplating the twisted passions of humans that play out in the face of an ever-approaching end of days. Will none of them save her now? Very well, Folkvi will save herself. The wedding date is set. But first comes a fateful summer. . . 

Deeply unsettling and brilliantly imagined, First Comes Summer captures the terror of losing the world you’ve always known—and the uncanny extremes to which you might go to hold on to it.