Book excerpt: The Tower at the Edge of the World is William Heinesen's last novel written when he was 76, and is the summation of all of his work. He is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Nordic author of the twentieth century. William Heinesen describes The Tower at the Edge of the World as a poetic mosaic novel about earliest childhood. There is the perspective of both the child and the old man looking back at his life as a child. Although there is a lot of tangible detail and recognisable characters the book has a mythic quality. The events in a small community in the windswept Atlantic ocean being recorded by the writer in his room, his tower at the edge of the world, have a larger than life feel. Torshavn and his childhood are used to tell the history of the world and of creation. 'William Heinesen was, by a long way, the best writer that the Faroe Islands have ever produced. Many have him down as the most important Scandinavian novelist of the 20th century, and he only declined a Nobel prize because he thought it should go to someone who wrote in Faeroese, which he didn't.' Laurence Phelan in The Independent on Sunday