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Olaf Olafsson

Biography

Olaf Olafsson

Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of THE JOURNEY HOME, ABSOLUTION, WALKING INTO THE NIGHT, RESTORATION, ONE STATION AWAY, THE SACRAMENT, TOUCH, and a story collection, VALENTINES. He is the former executive vice president of Time Warner and lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

Olaf Olafsson

Books by Olaf Olafsson

by Olaf Olafsson - Fiction

When the pandemic hits, Kristofer is forced to shutter his successful restaurant in Reykjavik, sending him into a spiral of uncertainty, even as his memory seems to be failing. But an uncanny bolt from the blue --- a message from Miko Nakamura, a woman whom he had known in the ’60s when they were students in London --- both inspires and rattles him, as he is drawn inexorably back into a love story that has marked him for life. Even as the pandemic upends his world, Kristofer finds himself pulled toward an answer to the mystery of Miko’s sudden departure decades before, compelling him to travel to London and Japan as the virus threatens to shut everything down.

by Olaf Olafsson - Fiction

A young nun is sent by the Vatican to investigate allegations of misconduct at a Catholic school in Iceland. During her time there, a young student at the school watches the school’s headmaster, Father August Franz, fall to his death from the church tower. Two decades later, the child --- now a grown man --- calls the nun back to the scene of the crime. This trip brings her former visit, as well as her years as a young woman in Paris, powerfully and sometimes painfully to life. In Paris, she met an Icelandic girl who she has not seen since, but whose acquaintance changed her life, a relationship she relives all while reckoning with the mystery of August Franz’s death and the abuses of power that may have brought it on.

by Olaf Olafsson - Fiction

An overlooked pianist who finally receives fraught success after decades of disappointment. An elusive dancer whose untimely death her fiancé is desperate to untangle. A mysterious patient who is comatose after a violent accident. These are the three women who animate ONE STATION AWAY. Magnus, a New York neurologist --- son to one, lover to another, and doctor to a third --- is the thread that binds these women’s stories together as he navigates relationships defined by compromise and misunderstanding, guilt and forgiveness, and, most of all, by an obsessive attempt to communicate --- to understand and to be understood, to love and to be loved.

by Olaf Olafsson - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Having grown up in a circle of wealthy British ex-pats in Florence in the 1920s, Alice Orsini shocks everyone when she marries the son of a minor Italian landowner. But her restlessness pulls her a reckless affair that will have devastating consequences.