A memoir written as a love letter to Iceland was warmly welcomed in The Sunday Times by Ceci Browning, assistant literary editor — not least because the writer isn’t a celebrity or an internet influencer. Hannah Kent, a 40-year-old Australian, published a bestselling novel in 2013, Burial Rites (based on the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland). But “in the grand scheme of the internet”, Browning says, Kent isn’t famous, so it’s cheering that her memoir found a publisher. Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador, £16.99) is “a lyrically written but low-stakes account” of living in Iceland as a teenager on a student-exchange scheme and then being drawn back many times, first to revisit the Icelandic families she had bonded with, and then to research her novel. It is, says Browning, “far more enlightening than the hastily cobbled-together writings of a content creator could ever be”.