FREYJA

A series of odd occurrences lead Reykjavík single mother Unnur to believe her childhood best friend, who disappeared and was presumed dead more than 20 years ago, is still alive.

Left parentless by her mother’s death, Unnur grew up under painful circumstances. At age 11, she’s dumped at a coastal work farm by her mother’s intolerant identical twin sister. Unnur gets over her initial shock and dismay thanks to the presence of Freyja, a playful but elusive girl her age who’s made a playground of the rocky environs. But Freyja fails to return from one of her solo jaunts to what locals call the Dark Valley with its black-sand beach, leaving a swirl of urgent secrets behind her. Some crucial ones involve Elias, the aging American veteran who owns the farm. Flash forward to 2018, when Unnur is shaken out of a quiet existence with her 7-year-old daughter, Lilja, by a mysteriously delivered envelope of old Polaroids. It bears the words, “Hœ Unna. Remember me?” Only one person ever called her that: Freyja. When Unnur’s long-absent ex-husband, Nói, shows up with a surprise wife, Lóa—and an even bigger surprise, a little girl named Freyja—the unnerving of Unnur continues. Still to come: threats to her custody of Lilja by Lóa, a shady antagonist who turns out to be a police detective investigating the original Freyja’s disappearance. Melding past and present, Thors effectively toys with the impulsive Unnur’s own dark secrets and reliability as a narrator—one who can’t remember “what kind of things [she] had done.” Could she have done something terrible to her friend? A long section of belatedly presented material about the Icelandic mysticism Freyja was drawn to throws things a bit off keel. But the threatened mother’s raw emotion and the book’s atmospheric pull are difficult to resist.

A nifty generational thriller in which the past eerily overlaps the present.