Square Sails and Dragons is the well-crafted début novel by American poet Celia Lund. The book is a work of fiction based around real events, and the cast of characters includes some very familiar names. Read the full story

Iceland’s capital, the City of Reykjavik, has been declared a City of Literature by the United Nations’ culture and heritage agency, UNESCO. Read the full story

Fully 180 different Icelandic books and books about Iceland are being published in German this year. The German book market caters to 100 million people. Read the full story

Media firm Sonoma has acquired Swedish and Finnish educational firm Tammi Learning. Read the full story

Where the Shadows Lie is a new book from British author Michael Ridpath. It is about modern police work, the Icelandic sagas and The Lord of the Rings; all set in Iceland and in Boston. Sounds confusing, right? Read the full story

The American author Christina Sunley is in Iceland to promote her novel set in the country, The Tricking of Freya. Although critically acclaimed in North America, Sunley is virtually unknown in Iceland and aims to change that this month. Read the full story

“What got me going was that parents have been phoning me about their children who are not going to make it to the first day of school because they have been unable to buy books,” says Thorhallur Heimsson, the priest of Hafnarfjordur Church. Read the full story

A gifted British boy with an exceptionally high I.Q. and a photographic memory has had his own memory preserved in a new book he helped write with his mother.

Titus Dickens came from a loving and stable family and was entertaining his grandfather by quoting Churchill’s speeches at just 18 months of age. Exceptionally talented in art, singing and acting, Titus had the highest I.Q. his psychologist had ever seen.

But Titus’s gift slowly turned into a curse, The Telegraph reports. Buckling under the pressure to excel, and dispirited by interactions with his peers, he spiralled into an addictive search for ‘the ultimate high’ through drugs and stimulants; be they legal, illegal or prescribed. Read the full story

Drawing on Iceland’s geography and mythology, writer Betsy Tobin has written a novel which captures the country’s culture and beauty. The Telegraph has called her book “a feminine Viking epic”, indeed Ice Land is no boring historical tale.

Tobin’s book weaves together three narratives set in 1000 AD. The tale follows characters to a country inhabited by dwarves in search of magical items on the wings of a falcon.

The story speaks of timeless themes such as love, family and change, themes perfectly suited to a landscape which is continually erupting into magma and melting from ice. Drawing on ancient myths, the novel is surprisingly modern and completely relevant to today’s world.

“Our great strength as a people has been that we have been united by a common belief and, more importantly, by a common law,” Tobin writes. “If we divide the law then we must divide the peace.”

The novel explores the challenges of the gods, and the adventures and passions of humans. One of her characters tells his granddaughter, “Love is not like a spring flood, Fulla. It comes to us in tiny increments. And there are many things that masquerade in its name.”

Betsy Tobin is the author of the mystery novel “Bone House” and published “The Bounce” in 2002.