Independent People by Halldór Laxness (1934)

On a patch of debt-soured marshland that better men called cursed, a sheep farmer raises a turf hut and renames the place Summerhouses, and for this freehold he has waited eighteen years as another man's hired hand. Bjartur owes nothing to anyone, and he will go on owing nothing though it costs him every person who loves him. His religion is independence, fierce as scripture and just as merciless, and Laxness lets you feel both its grandeur and the slow horror of what it tramples. The wonder of the book is Ásta Sóllilja, his stepdaughter, the flower of his life, the one soft thing in a world of frost and lungworm and unpaid debt, and the way his pride cannot keep itself from breaking her. Set on an island of sagas and snow, it holds an entire people's stubbornness in one stooped, unbending man, and it will leave you arguing with him long after the last page.