After a storm has killed off all the island's men, two women in a 1600s Norwegian coastal village struggle to survive against both natural forces and the men who have been sent to rid the community of alleged witchcraft.Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves.Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil.As Maren and Ursa are pushed together and are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence.Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials,The Merciesis a feminist story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.
About the Author
Everything, The Way Past Winter, and A Secret of Birds && Bone (2020). The Deathless Girls was her first YA novel. Her debut novel for adults is The Mercies (February 2020).
Between them, her children s books have won numerous awards including Children s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, the Waterstones Children s Book Prize, the Historical Association Young Quills Award, and the Blackwell s Children s Book of the Year. They have been shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Little Rebels Prize, the Branford Boase Award, the Blue Peter Best Story Award, Costa Children s Book Prize, and Foyles Children s Book of the Year, amongst others.
The Mercies debuted at number one of the The Times bestseller list, is a Sunday Time bestseller, and was selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. It is listed for the prestigious Prix Femina in France, and was called unquestionably the book of the 2018 London Book Fair by The Bookseller.
Kiran lives in Oxford with her husband, the artist Tom de Freston, and their rescue cat, Luna.
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