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Children live alone on a planet with no adults until a salesman arrives who can make them fly, for a price. The first children's book to win the Icelandic Literary Prize.

A teenager's winter break in Reykjavík goes wrong, and describing how would spoil it. It took the Women's Literature Prize, and the sequel Vetrarhörkur took the Icelandic Literary Prize. Short blunt sentences.

Adult Nordic Noir written under a pen name uncracked for close to thirty years. The narrator is a Reykjavík lawyer with the same name. Lean, fast prose with very little spent on scenery.

A Reykjavík detective inspector pushed into retirement at sixty-four and given one last cold case out of pity. The series then runs backwards, finding her at fifty and then at forty.

Erlendur Sveinsson works cold cases out of Reykjavík while his own family quietly comes apart around him. Grafarþögn won the CWA Gold Dagger in 2005. Mýrin is where the translations start.

A priest hunts a blue fox through a nineteenth-century winter while a herbalist buries a woman the parish would rather forget. Sjón calls it a þjóðsaga, a folktale. Barely a hundred pages, some holding a single line.

A middle-aged man packs his toolbox and travels to a country just out of a war, not intending to come home. Far warmer and funnier than that makes it sound.

The Eddic poem Skírnismál retold from Gerður's side: a giantess in Jötunheimar threatened into marrying a god she has never seen. Verse, ninety pages, a few words to a line.

A political science student writing about the far right sleeps with a neo-Nazi while her Lithuanian family's wartime history runs underneath. Six hundred pages, and the form shifts chapter to chapter.

A boy dug alive out of an avalanche in an Icelandic fjord in the 1880s, and the herring money that drags the place into the twentieth century. Three books; the first two took the Icelandic Literary Prize.

Iceland's Nobel laureate, and the novel most often named the country's greatest. Bjartur of Summerhouses is determined to owe nothing to anyone, and the book spends five hundred pages on what that costs. Brekkukotsannáll is the shorter way in.

The one to read if you read one. A feud that begins with an insult and ends with a burning, told in the flattest, most matter-of-fact prose imaginable. Printed in modern Icelandic spelling, so you do not need Old Norse for it.

Iceland's largest publisher sells its own ebooks as plain EPUB downloads, which you can put wherever you like. The cleanest way to legally own a contemporary Icelandic book.

Free EPUBs of out-of-copyright Icelandic books, scanned and then proofread by volunteers rather than left as raw OCR. That distinction matters: OCR noise wrecks a lemmatizer.

Every major saga, free, in EPUB and several other formats, in modern Icelandic spelling as well as the original orthography. Public domain and volunteer-run since 2007.

Audiobooks and ebooks by subscription. Nothing is sold individually.

Iceland's public broadcaster, the Icelandic NPR & PBS.

RÚV's news in easy Icelandic: short sentences, ordinary words, no assumed background. Written for anyone who finds the regular news hard going, learners very much included. The Icelandic 8 Sidor.

Free. RÚV television with interactive subtitles, colour-coded by how likely you are to know each word at a level you set yourself, and you can save words as you go. Roughly what Laesi does for books, aimed at video instead. Reports differ on whether it works from outside Iceland, so test it before you count on it.

The University of Iceland's free online course, several levels deep, with glossaries and grammar built in. A paid tutor-supported version exists, but the free one is the substance.

Morgunblaðið's site, one of the two most-read news sites in the country. Vísir (visir.is) is the other. Between them you get most of the Icelandic prose the country actually reads on a given day.