Anyway, my complaint here is that I don’t think it’s a good title, so it might as well have been picked out of a hat. It’s a thorn (þ) not a P, so it sounds more like “thig”. Ég man þig means “I Remember You” apparently, although translating that back into Icelandic (using Google) renders it as ég man eftir þér, so there’s that. I Remember You is a bit of a generic title, and I was convinced it was a case of a British publisher picking one out of a hat rather than using the original Icelandic title. “Scariest book I’ve ever read” sets up quite a challenge, and the recent benchmark for me (as mentioned a few days back) is Pine by Francine Toon, which grabbed me – in one scene in particular – and made horripilation happen all over my body. You can look up Hesteyri and see photos of the scattered houses, the abandoned mackerel processing plant (and former whaling station), and the old Doctor’s House, which acts as a guest house and café in the short summer season, when people visit the area for hiking holidays and murder ghosts. Whereas Dark Matter was set in a fictive location on Spitsbergen, I Remember You is set in the abandoned village of Hesteyri, and it’s nearest inhabited settlement, Ísafjörður, both in the far northwest of Iceland.

There’s a film of it, too, which is on Amazon Prime, I think. I’d never heard of this Icelandic novel, translated into English by Philip Roughton, but having just been in Norway for a gothic ghostier, I was in the mood to give this a try. Got this because it was recommended by my sister, who said it was the scariest book she’d ever read.

I remember you by yrsa sigurdardottir