This is the first in the Legend of the Ice People series. Margit Sandemo has sold over 39 million copies of her books across Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and is now printed in English for the first time. This seems as if it is going to be a run of the mill fantasy novel but is a more of a historical novel with fantasy elements thrown in. From the first few pages it will prick you curiosity and draw you in. Beginning in 1581 the series spans the next four centuries so if you like a saga this may be the one for you.
Winter 1581: a deadly plague outbreak robs sixteen-year old peasant girl Silje of all her family. Homeless, starving and shepherding two foundling infants, she stumbles through the corpse-strewn streets of Trondheim on Norway’s northern coast.
Heading desperately for the warmth of the mass funeral pyres blazing beyond the city gates, she encounters in the shadowy forest one of the infamous Ice People, a fearsome, strangely captivating ‘wolf man’. He offers help -- and she feels irresistibly drawn to him. But what is the terrible fascination ? And where will it lead?
Spellbound, the opening volume in The Legend of the Ice People, begins a journey that spans four centuries and interweaves romance and the supernatural in narratives that are passionate, earthy, often erotic and imbued above all else with a powerful narrative drive.
The life of Margit Sandemo could be lifted straight from one of her sagas. The daughter of a Swedish countess who abandoned her privileged upbringing to marry a crofter, Sandemo undoubtedly inherited her writing talent from her father – the illegitimate son of a Nobel Prize Winner for Literature – Ibsen’s friend and rival, Bjornsterne Bjornson.
Now in her eighties, Margit’s other great passion is white water rafting.
