Summer at Little Lava: A Season at the Edge of the World Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

Little Lava is a farmhouse on the west coast of Iceland. No roads lead to it; the way lies across a lagoon flooded twice a day by the tide. A lava field borders the farm. Views give onto mountains, volcanoes, rugged coast, and the pure Icelandic sky.

In Summer at Little Lava, Charles Fergus recounts how he fixed up the abandoned house and lived there one summer with his wife and their young son, in great simplicity, without heat, electricity, or running water. Inspired by Henry Beston's classic The Outermost House, Fergus saw Iceland as the "outermost house" of civilization. "I went to Iceland for my own reasons", he writes, "my own rewards: solitude, birds on the wing, the heating breath of the wind in my face, and the chance to take the days one at a time, the long, bright days of the northern summer". As it happened, there was a sudden, cruel, senseless death in his family, and the twilit open spaces of Iceland became a place for Fergus to ponder the meaning of human life. "Little Lava was a place where I could pass the days in peace", he observes, "where I could take the first steps into a future that, I hoped, would not be so dimmed with grief and pain". His account touches on Iceland and Icelanders, birds and nature, tragedy and personal loss; it vividly evokes the strange and compelling landscape of Iceland.