Hardback: On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardo is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardo wiped out in an instant.
Now the women must fend for themselves.
Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilized world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardo to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardo, and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty and terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs.
Inspired by the real events of the Vardo storm and the 1621 witch trials, Kiran Millwood Hargrave's The Mercies (2020) is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and a love that may prove as dangerous as it is powerful.
About the author: An author, playwright and poet, Kiran Millwood Hargrave is best known for her award-winning children’s fiction. Waterstones booksellers have been passionate advocates of her work since they chose her bestselling debut, The Girl of Ink of Stars as the winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2017, the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year, and the Blackwell's Children's Book of the Year and been shortlisted for prizes such as the Costa Children's Book Award and the Blue Peter Story Award. Since then she has published The Island at the End of Everything, The Way Past Winter and The Deathless Girls. Kiran lives by the river in Oxford, with her husband, artist Tom de Freston, and their rescue cat, Luna.
The Mercies, is Kiran's first novel for adults. The Mercies, previously titled Vardø, was subject to a 13-way auction and called ‘unquestionably the book of the 2018 London Book Fair’ by The Bookseller.
Rating: 5/5
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