Burial Rites

by Hannah Kent

Ebook, ?

Genres

Historical Fiction

Collections

Your library, eBooks

Description

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. . . . BURIAL RITES evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place --

Media reviews

The Independent (London)

One of the best “Scandinavian” crime novels I have read, Burial Rites is the work of an Australian who visited Iceland on a cultural exchange.

— 10 more

The Wall Street Journal

The novel isn't seamless—Ms. Kent disrupts its rhythms by awkwardly switching between an omniscient narrator and Agnes's first-person point of view. But it convincingly animates Agnes, who feels "knifed to the hilt with fate," showing her headstrong humanity and heart-wrenching thirst for life.

At one point she recalls seeing two icebergs grinding together off the northern shore, the friction from their exposed boulders causing gathered driftwood to go up in flames. At her best, Ms. Kent achieves a similar eerie force in this story of passion in a frozen place.

Show Less

New York Times

There are other stylistic problems. Some dialogue that’s meant to seem elevated and of its time simply sounds unidiomatic: “I was worried of as much”; “The only recourse to her absolution would be through prayer.” There’s prefab phrasing — “my heart throbbed,” “she said

breathlessly,” “overcome with relief” — and descriptive clichés, including a sky that’s “bright, bright blue, so bright you could weep.”

Show Less

Daily Express (London)

A remarkable story of the last case of capital punishment recorded in Iceland, Burial Rites is the extraordinary debut novel by Australian author Hannah Kent.

The Guardian

Burial Rites is a debut of rare sophistication and beauty – a simple but moving story, meticulously researched and hauntingly told.

The Sunday Times (London)

Although its setting — Iceland in 1829 — is strikingly unpromising, Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites is a remarkable achievement.

The Adelaide Review

Amidst an agrarian existence of bleak deprivation, the stories, whether Biblical or other, that characters tell themselves in Burial Rites are the meat they feed off; small but compelling pleasures they allow themselves.

Sydney Morning Herald

Hannah Kent has a fine turn of phrase. It is this, more than anything, that makes Agnes Magnusdottir, the central figure in her debut novel, both elusive and captivating.

The Monthly (Australia)

A major two-book deal with Pan Macmillan and some heavyweight PR means that most will read about Kent’s work before they read the novel itself, a pressure this competent debut could do without. Having started life as a verse novel, Burial Rites still bulges at its seams, descriptive lyricism

occasionally spilling over into excess.

Show Less

The Australian

IT all started because she was a girl who had never seen snow. That lack, commonplace enough in an Australian childhood, took Hannah Kent to a desolate hillside in Iceland where, more than 170 years earlier, one woman's life came to a brutal end.

The Telegraph (London)

The author, who has researched with utmost scrupulousness this spare, disquieting first novel about the last execution to occur in Iceland, describes it as a “dark love letter” to the country. Dark it certainly is, with a sombre foreboding so thick it is almost tangible. ...Kent portrays the

harsh existence of these rural, highly literate people with exactitude; and even the bleakness of Agnes’s end, its gut-churning fear, holds an exhilaration that borders on the sublime.

Show Less