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  • MacLehose Press

My Yellow Submarine

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"Stefansson is a writer of great scope and imagination" RONAN HESSION, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

A middle-aged man on a bench in a London park sees Paul McCartney sitting nearby.

He wonders whether he should go over and offer him a book, the Epic of Gilgamesh. But first he must collect his thoughts. His imagination runs away with him, and he thinks back to his own youth . . .

A mother plays 'Yellow Submarine' on the harmonica to her seven-year-old son. She dies and leaves a void. A few months later, The Beatles split up. Another great loss in the boy's life. A distant father doesn't make things easier. Only when the boy starts borrowing books from the library does he understand the direction his life should take.

Yellow Submarine is a masterful and life-affirming novel that sees a boy's childhood linked to the timeless story of that is the Epic of Gilgamesh, to The Beatles, and to Iceland in the eighties. A compelling read, written with great feeling.

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Jon Kalman Stefansson

Jon Kalman Stefansson's novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature and his novel Summer Light, and then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy - Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize) - and for Fish Have No Feet (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017).

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