CoDex 1962

Sjón Sceptre €23

‘The biomass of fiction is growing,’ writes Icelandic novelist Sjón, tossing his own jumble of words on to the pile. CoDex 1962, which could be described as a sprawling epic, follows the fortunes of a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who ends up in Iceland, where his son is born in 1962. The spine of the story is solid enough but its outer limbs – a mish-mash of folk legends, Scandi noir and dystopian science fiction – splay out in all directions, leaving the poor reader confused and exhausted.