A jewel of the North (Part 1)

The Journey Home. By Olaf Olafsson. Faber & Faber. 296pp, £9.99 in UK

Disa is an accomplished cook who runs an upmarket country-house hotel in Somerset with her close companion, Anthony. On the face of it, her life is quintessential middle England: polite, discreet, well-ordered.

But Disa is Icelandic, and when she discovers she is terminally ill, she decides to visit the village in northern Iceland where she was born. As the journey progresses, she finds herself remembering the events of her life, many of which she has spent years trying to forget: her estrangement from her mother, the murder of her fiance by the Nazis, her previous job in a superficially comfortable but emotionally explosive household.

With its exquisite attention to detail and atmosphere of genteel repression, this novel inevitably brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, but its sensitivity to landscape and the natural world marks it as peculiarly Nordic. The writing throughout is quietly beautiful, the story weaving elegantly between past and present, the characters drawn with skill and humour.

Now who, you may ask, is Olaf Olafsson? Well, he's a hi-tech whizzkid who, apart from being unconscionably young - born Reykjavik 1962, looks about 20 in the jacket photograph - is vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media and a former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment. His debut novel, Absolution, published in 1994, was so highly praised that one critic labelled him a future Nobel prize-winner. Phew! Day job, anyone?

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist