The Strongest Woman in the World

In series with Open Letter’s Icelandic Triptych, The Strongest Woman in the World is a striking family saga that follows two siblings’ search for stability in the face of personal weakness and unexpected power.

She has the strength to move the world—but chooses to hold it still.

Siblings Eidur and Gunnhildur grow up in a household balanced uneasily between emotional volatility and unspoken grief—a home where their parents are never happy at the same time. When tragedy fractures the family, the siblings are separated, their lives diverging in unexpected and quietly extraordinary ways.

Eiður turns to activism, seeking order and justice in a world that rarely offers either. Traveling to Lesbos to lead a group of rebel activists aiding the refugee crisis, he fears that he lacks the passion and empathy necessary to enact true social change. Gunnhildur, who hides a strength most would find unimaginable, becomes a mortician, renowned for her ability to lend peace and dignity to the dead. In her meticulous care for the bodies of others, she finds a way to hold the world still, if only briefly.

The Strongest Woman in the World is a haunting, quietly powerful novel about what we inherit and what we choose, about resilience, shame, and the invisible forms of strength. With precise, affecting prose, Steinunn G. Helgadóttir tells an unforgettable story of lives shaped by loss, bound by memory, and defined by the question of what it truly means to endure.