In Nathaniel Ian Miller’s gritty yet tender sophomore novel, Red Dog Farm, Orri is on the horns of a dilemma—or would be, if the cattle he helps raise in the Borgarbyggd region of western Iceland actually had horns. He’s at that awkward crossroads where deciding about higher education, finding your way around relationships and becoming an independent adult all collide. After a term at college in the big city (Reykjavik, population 140,000), Orri returns to the struggling family farm on early “vacation” to lend his father a hand. Pabbi—dad in Icelandic—is said to be suffering from depression, though he is loath to admit it.
While a farmer’s job is by no means easy even in the most fertile of settings, Iceland’s short growing season, frequently inclement weather and scarcely arable volcanic landscape seem almost perversely designed to conspire against a farmer’s success. As Pabbi tells his son, trying to disabuse him of the romance of farming, “It’s not cuddly lambs and horses shaking their manes in the afternoon light. It’s grit and misery.” Undeterred, Orri works alongside, if not exactly with, his father as spring stretches into summer.
One evening, while trolling the internet for a potential partner for a neighbor, Orri comes across Mihan, a part-time student and fellow fan of a “semi-obscure Kiwi musician.” If the match wasn’t made in heaven—no one would confuse the internet with that—it certainly piques Orri’s fancy. Who wouldn’t be charmed by an online profile that declares, “If you tell me to smile I will stab you in the face.”
So now Orri has two potentially exclusive interests competing for his attention, and, each in their own way, his affection. How he navigates a path toward fulfillment lies at the core of this heartfelt coming-of-age story.
It’s fitting that Red Dog Farm is being released in France as Dans Nos Pierres et Dans Nos Os (“In Our Stones and in Our Bones”), because that’s exactly where it’s coming from. Miller’s evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland is note-perfect.
