As the story begins, Bjartur ('bright' or 'fair') has recently managed to put down the first payment on his own farm, after eighteen years working as a shepherd at Útirauðsmýri, the home of the well-to-do local bailiff, a man he detests. It reminds us that life on an Icelandic croft had scarcely altered over a millennium'. Independent People is a pointedly timeless tale.

The book is set in the early decades of the twentieth century but.

The 'first chapter summons up the days when the world was first settled, in 874 AD-for that is the year when the Norsemen arrived in Iceland, and one of the book's wry conceits is that no other world but Iceland exists. Independent People is the story of the sheep farmer Guðbjartur Jónsson, generally known in the novel as Bjartur of Summerhouses, and his struggle for independence. This book, along with several other major novels, helped Laxness win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. It is an indictment of materialism, the cost of the self-reliant spirit to relationships, and capitalism itself. The novel is considered among the foremost examples of social realism in Icelandic fiction in the 1930s. It deals with the struggle of poor Icelandic farmers in the early 20th century, only freed from debt bondage in the last generation, and surviving on isolated crofts in an inhospitable landscape. Independent People: An Epic ( Icelandic: Sjálfstætt fólk) is a novel by Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, originally published in two volumes in 19 literally the title means 'Self-standing folk'.

Sjálfstætt fólk by Halldór Laxness