'Names for the Sea' recounts Sarah Moss's experiences teaching literature and writing at the university level for a year in Reykjavik. Relocating from England, she had no idea what to expect from Iceland, and much of the book relates her mystification at Icelandic ways: their daredevil driving, their disdain for walking and public transit (which becomes a bit more clear in winter's freezing temperatures), their chilly reception of outsiders, and their horror at the notion of secondhand anything. She acknowledges arriving at a particular time in Icelandic history, just when speculation-fueled high spending and growth had collapsed under the weight of a worldwide depression in 2009. She spends time with Icelanders who are accustomed to outsiders, like the country's gnome and elf expert, but since she has difficulty getting to know the "real" Icelander, her other line of inquiry has is the weather in all its soul- and body-testing extremes. Oddly enough, her prose really soars in the last section of the book, when she and her family have moved to Cornwall, and they return for a brief vacation. They visit all the sights they'd missed as working people, and marvel at the geology and the the wildlife, the sky and the sea especially.