The Tricking of Freya

Heart-shaped Lake Viti in the Askja caldera, Iceland

After three weeks of crying I turned off the television.  I would contact the real estate agent Vera had found and start the process of selling the house.  I would pack up Mama's things and ... do what with them?  I walked through the house. My bones felt oddly light, like the wings of origami birds.  And my vision seemed strangely keen. Certain objects belonging to mama seemed to ... glow.  Glow is too strong a word.  To emanate.  As if something of my mother remained inside.  Like a cut flower in a vase, dead but with some life still coursing through the stem.  This was how I saw my mother's hairbrush sitting on top of the television set, the reading glasses, attached to a woven red cord hanging from the kitchen doorknob, a pair of brown leather loafers, molded exactly to the shape of my mother's small wide feet.  The essence of Mama's life still clinging to her belongings.  But how long, I worried, until that essence would begin to evaporate?

Extract from Christina Sunley's debut novel, The Tricking of Freya, 2009, St Martin's Press


There are books in which the lives of fictional characters parallel the characters in ones real-life, and their stories and your story weave in-and-out, under-and-over, through-and-beyond. The Tricking of Freya is such a story; filled with antidotes that help to dissipate the essence of a karmic family inheritance which has outlasted three generations of my family, and which threatens to outlast religion.

Not if I have anything to do with it...

... and I do.

Icelandic words are tricksters.  Acrobats. Masters of disguise. Shape-shifters.