In the summer of 2009 I moved to Reykjavik with my young family. I stopped writing. Not writing didn’t matter – phases of silence are good for writers the way winter is good for trees – but it was uncomfortable. Iceland is a deeply literary country, its national identity founded in the sagas, which recount the first centuries of settlement beginning a thousand years ago. Icelanders read more books than anyone else, and writing and storytelling are highly valued. Writers with no particular connection to Iceland often feel called to visit in order to research and write novels set there, and before we moved I imagined that I might, too. A family of medieval outlaws, I thought, or something experimental about extreme weather and the human condition, or maybe just a novel about a family who move to Iceland. How could a story fail to turn up?

Courtesy here is like the plants – everything is close to the ground and slow-growing

Most of my writing starts with a place. I know the writing places when I meet them, not usually romantic landscapes but sites of human interaction over decades or centuries: prehistoric dwellings or sites of worship, hospitals, harbours, places where people have gone to meet and part, to pray or grieve or rejoice.

I’m sure the Icelandic landscape is heaving (sometimes literally) with stories, but they weren’t mine. I experienced my foreign-ness in a way that I hadn’t in long stays in France and Germany. I couldn’t, at first, read Icelanders’ emotions. No one ever seemed to be cross or afraid or excited. They had to borrow from English when they wanted to swear, and didn’t understand the weight of unprintable words. I watched Icelandic films and couldn’t follow the story, even with subtitles, because I didn’t understand the relationship between what was said (not much) and what was done (mostly violence and manual labour). I lost the plot. I didn’t write stories. I apologised all the time, for being there, for not speaking Icelandic, for asking whatever I was asking, and because the pre-emptive apology is not part of Icelandic social currency, every apology made me seem more strange and feel more apologetic. Sorry, sorry for saying sorry. I didn’t make jokes or laugh, because that wasn’t my place. I made myself small and I kept quiet and watched and learned: the classic response of the new immigrant.

Icelandic, famously, has no word for “please”, and takk is used much less than Brits use “thank you”. More than ever, I needed to be polite, but there were no words. It’s all there, my colleague Pétur told me – Icelanders can choose rudeness or manners just like anyone else – but it’s very small. Courtesy here is like the plants, there’s not much sun and a short season, so everything is close to the ground and slow-growing – but it is all there and it all works. You will see it.

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I came to see it with the winter. By December, we had three official hours of daylight in 24, but it didn’t feel like that; from mid-morning the sky began to pale, and by the time the sun crossed the horizon at lunchtime there had been hours of growing light. I cycled home along the coast path from work through a sunset that went on all afternoon, reflected first in moving water and later, more muted, on the sea-ice. When the wind allowed, I kept my summertime habit of a bedtime walk, now over snow that was sometimes moonlit, watching for the northern lights. It was never truly dark, because I had learned to see modulations of light unnoticeable further south, and in the same way I learned to see modulations of self-expression unnoticeable in societies more invested in the performance of modesty and a certain kind of manners. Of course there is gratitude, contrition and even self-deprecation in Iceland, of course there are ways to express excitement and rage. The problem had been that I couldn’t recognise them. My Icelandic remained elementary, but I had learned the dimensions of what I did not know.

I never did set a story in Iceland, but after we left I became fascinated by Japanese art, and wrote a novel in which a Victorian engineer, accustomed to the grand scale and measurable progress of imperial infrastructure, falls for an aesthetic that attends to the shape of a raindrop and the pattern of circles spreading on a pond. I’ve just written one partly about soundwaves and the building practices of ants: Iceland taught me new ways to learn from being small and quiet.

• Sarah Moss is a novelist and academic