The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen

There is a glut of what are, IMO, mediocre, expository island books right now (Clear by Carys Davies, Wild Dark Shore). This is the antidote to those. A multi-generational chronicle of a family holding out and subsistence farming on a remote Norwegian island at the start of the 20th century. It burns slowly, it’s a lifetime, it has romance and tragedy and hopefulness and politics and reads the opposite of the current style of hand-holding page-turner media we’ve become so used to in the 2020s. Your patience will pay off.