Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Nordic Book Club meets monthly via Zoom to discuss contemporary literature in translation. On December 8, 2026, we’ll discuss Icelandic author Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s The Strongest Woman in the World, in translation by ASF Translation Prizewinner Larissa Kyzer.

Siblings Eiður and Gunnhildur grow up in a household balanced uneasily between emotional volatility and unspoken grief—a home where their parents are never happy at the same time. When tragedy fractures the family, the siblings are separated, their lives diverging in unexpected and quietly extraordinary ways.

Eiður turns to activism, seeking order and justice in a world that rarely offers either. Traveling to Lesbos to lead a group of rebel activists aiding the refugee crisis, he fears that he lacks the passion and empathy necessary to enact true social change. Gunnhildur, who hides a physical strength most would find unimaginable, becomes a mortuary cosmetologist, renowned for her ability to lend peace and dignity to the dead. In her meticulous care for the bodies of others, she finds a way to hold the world still, if only briefly.

These two threads—Gunnhildur’s superhero-like strength and Eiður’s activism—come together at a jail, where Gunnhildur attempts to prove that she really is the strongest woman in the world.

The Strongest Woman in the World is available from Open Letter, Bookshop.org and other retailers.

Register