The Puffins are not your typical college football team. Playing for the University of Iceland, they represent a tiny country where dreams and illusions run wild. Their head coach is a woman, their athletic director is an unqualified misfit, one of their star players grew up in a cult, and another is living a double life.

As the Puffins ascend through the ranks of American college football, sights set on winning a championship, an array of colliding secrets and internal divisions threatens to tear them apart. Entangled in their own ambitions and prejudices, the characters discover that the real drama occurs off the field, in the hidden rooms of Reykjavik, a city that has all of the attractions of an international capital, only on a diminutive scale.

Set against a backdrop of mountains, corrugated iron, and gale-force winds, Year of the Puffin captures the passions and obsessions of both sports and life-the saga of American football in the land of fire and ice.