Embroidery

"Absolutely brilliant from beginning to end."--Halla Oddny Magnusdottir, National TV

"A complex and arresting novel where a super precise style and an ingenious construction come together."--Nomination Committee for the Women's Literature Prize

"Like a cubist work of art."--Johanna Maria Einarsdottir, DV

"As her state of mind becomes increasingly fraught, Lytton Smith's adept translation skillfully conveys [the narrator's] neurotic, internal experience, which often expresses possibilities, thoughts, speculation, and interpretations instead of an external reality."--Callum McAllister, Asymptote Journal

"History. A Mess is at once a disturbing but riveting portrait of a glassy psyche and an enlightening critique of the constraints and pressures of modern scholarship."--Bailey Trela, Ploughshares

"Fans of the nouveau roman--Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, etc.--will be right at home here."--Kirkus Reviews

"Palsdottir writes with the hand of a mystery author and the mind of a postmodernist, teasing out her protagonist's problem while playing with literary forms, fragmenting timelines, and injecting fierce irony."--Publishers Weekly

"Its ambition is met with resounding success every step of the way."--Books and Bao

"What I admire most about Palsdottir's writing is her ability to hide a strictly structured course of events under a gliding, occasionally deliberately (but not distractingly) chaotic style; her ability to orchestrate the random; to construct a perspective for the narrator that, most of the time, reveals both everything and nothing about what is actually going on; and the way she covers real tensions and worries with a quilt of details, as they are so often covered in life."--Rein Raud, European Literature Network