Growing up on his family’s cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things. But the outer world still beckons, so he leaves his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn father, Pabbi, to attend university in Reykjavík. No longer able to find joy in his way of life, Pabbi falls into a depression soon after Orri goes away to school. Feeling adrift and aimless at the end of his first semester, Orri comes home. For the first time, Pabbi allows Orri to help him run the farm. Meanwhile, Orri meets a kindred spirit on the internet: Mihan, a part-time student. Over time, their connection deepens. By year’s end, Orri must decide whether he wants to --- or should --- return to university, and what a future with Mihan would hold, if she’ll have him.

In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year. He might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time as a miner ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, and Sven flees even further, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a loyal dog, he builds a hut and lives alone, testing himself against the elements. Years into his routine isolation, the arrival of an unlikely visitor salves his loneliness, sparking a chain of surprising events that will bring Sven into a family of fellow castoffs and determine the course of the rest of his life.