The Ice-Shirt

A majestic fictional evocation of the Norse arrival in the New World, from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central
 
The time is the tenth century A.D. The newcomers are a proud and bloody-minded people whose kings once changed themselves into wolves. The Norse have advanced as implacably as a glacier from Iceland to the wastes of Greenland and from there to the place they call “Vinland the Good.” The natives are a bronze-skinned race who have not yet discovered iron and still see themselves as part of nature.

As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples–and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise–he creates a tour-de-force of speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past.