In his spellbinding first novel, acclaimed Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson takes us inside the mind of a man haunted by the crime he willed half a century earlier.

Expatriate businessman Peter Peterson left behind the trappings of a seemingly charmed life: a vast fortune, two children, and a stately Park Avenue address. But he also left behind another legacy: a secret from long ago that shadowed his accomplishments and estranged him from his loved ones—a crime of passion, committed in the throes of unrequited love, that became a lifetime’s burden. Yet when Peter is forced to confront the consequences of his actions, an unexpected turn of events shakes the very foundation of his past. Spanning a boyhood in Iceland to the Nazi occupation of Denmark to modern-day Manhattan, Absolution calls up Dostoevsky and Ibsen as it masterfully plumbs the darkest corners of a sinister mind and a wounded heart.