It is based on the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman in Iceland to be executed for murder.
As a teenager, Hannah Kent travelled to Iceland on a Rotary Exchange and the country clearly made a powerful impression on her; she describes the book as her dark love letter to Iceland.
This is a remarkable first novel. Kent wraps you up in 19th-century Iceland, its beauty, poverty and mean living conditions.
She uses personification beautifully: ''Autumn fell upon the valley like a gasp. Margret, lying awake in the extended gloom of the October morning, her lungs mossy with mucus, wondered at how the light had grown slow in coming; how it seemed to stagger through the window, as though weary from travelling such a long way.''
When a servant scrubs a spillage of blood from a miscarriage and Agnes watches ''the fat of her arms wobble'' as she wrings ''the pinked water from the rag over and over again'' we are sitting watching, too.
Although this is Agnes' story (and she is a strongly portrayed, sympathetic character), the land and climate are so real, the cold seeps through every page. This a book to savour for its fine writing. But don't read it if you're after a warm, happy way to block out winter.
- Patricia Thwaites is a retired schoolteacher.
