| |
1 |
Burial Rites: A NOVEL
Author:
Kent, Hannah
|
| |
|
Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
|
LC: PR9619
Print Run: 175000
|
|
ISBN-13: 9780316243919
LCCN: 2013014305
Imprint: Little, Brown and Company
|
|
Pub Date: 09/10/2013
Availability: Available
List: $38.00
|
| |
Hardcover
|
|
|
Physical Description:
|
322 pages : illustration ; 25 cm
H 9.25",
W 6",
D 0.875",
1.29 lbs.
|
|
LC Series:
|
|
|
Brodart Sources:
|
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
|
|
Bibliographies:
|
Fiction Core Collection, 18th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 19th ed.
Fiction Core Collection, 20th ed.
Texas Lariate Reading List
|
|
Awards:
|
BookPage Best Books
Booklist Starred Reviews
Indies Choice/E.B. White Read-Aloud Book Award Winners and Honors
Kirkus Starred Reviews
Library Journal Starred Reviews
|
|
Starred Reviews:
|
Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal
|
|
TIPS Subjects:
|
Biographical Fiction
|
|
BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Thrillers / Psychological
FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
|
|
LC Subjects:
|
Biographical fiction
Iceland, Fiction
Women murderers, Fiction
|
|
SEARS Subjects: |
Biographical fiction
Iceland, Fiction
Women criminals, Fiction
|
|
Reading Programs: |
|
|
|
| |
| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 06/01/2013 |
| On an isolated farm, Agnes waits for death. With family members no longer wanting anything to do with Agnes, who stands accused of killing her old master, Agnes finds unexpected comfort in the open-minded farmer's wife and daughters, who open their hearts to another side of Agnes's tragic tale. This was inspired by a true story. Debut Novel, 336pp., 175K |
|
| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 07/01/2013 |
| It is March 1829, and Agnes Magnusdottir has been sentenced to be beheaded for murdering her employer. Due to the cost of keeping her imprisoned, she is sent to the farm of district commissioner Jon Jonsson, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, until her execution. She arrives at the farm filthy, bruised, and bleeding due to the cruelty with which she has been treated during her imprisonment. The mistress of the farm immediately puts her to work scything the harvest, churning butter, and making sausages, while a young priest visits with her to prepare her soul for death. It is from their conversations that Agnes' story becomes known: abandonment by her mother condemns her to life as a pauper subject to the behest of her many employers, and her intelligence only makes her more of a target. Kent's debut novel, she says, is my dark love letter to Iceland, and rarely has a country's starkness and extreme weather been rendered so exquisitely. The harshness of the landscape and the lifestyle of nineteenth-century Iceland, with its dank turf houses and meager food supply, is as finely detailed as the heartbreak and tragedy of Agnes' life, based on the true story of the last woman executed there. Haunting reading from a bright new talent. Wilkinson, Joanne. 336p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
|
| Kirkus Reviews | 04/15/2013 |
| With language flickering, sparkling and flashing like the northern lights, Kent debuts with a study of Agnes Magnusdottir, an Icelandic servant convicted of an 1828 murder. The murder was horrific: two men bludgeoned, stabbed and burnt. Agnes and two others were convicted, but sentences--Agnes was to be beheaded--require confirmation by Denmark's royal government. Kent opens her powerful narrative with Agnes, underfed and unwashed, being moved from district capital imprisonment to Kornsa, a valley farmstead. Stoic, dutiful Jon and his tubercular wife, Margret, are forced by circumstance to accept her charge. Reflecting intimate research, the story unfolds against the fearsome backdrop of 19th-century Icelandic life. It's a primitive world where subsistence farmers live in crofts--dirt-floored, turf-roofed hovels--and life unfolds in badstofa, communal living/sleeping rooms. Beautiful are Kent's descriptions of the interminable summer light, the ever-present snow and ice and cold of winter's gloomy darkness, the mountains, sea and valleys where sustenance is blood-rung from sheep. Assistant Rev. Thorvardur has been assigned to "direct this murderess to the way of truth and repentance," but he is more callow youth than counselor. His sessions with Agnes come and go, and he becomes enamored of Agnes and obsessed by her life's struggles. Kent deftly reveals the mysterious relationship between Agnes, a servant girl whom valley folk believe a "[b]astard pauper with a conniving spirit," and now-dead Natan Ketilsson, a healer, some say a sorcerer, for whom she worked as a housekeeper. Kent writes movingly of Natan's seduction of the emotionally stunted Agnes--"When the smell of him, of sulphur and crushed herbs, and horse-sweat and the smoke from his forge, made me dizzy with pleasure"--his heartless manipulation and his cruel rejection. The narrative is revealed in third person, interspersed with Agnes' compelling first-person accounts. The saga plays out in a community sometimes revenge-minded and sometimes sympathetic, with Margret moving from angry rejection to near love, Agnes ever stoic and fearful, before the novel reaches an inevitable, realistic and demanding culmination. A magical exercise in artful literary fiction. 336pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
|
| Library Journal | 07/01/2013 |
| Australian writer Kent marks her literary debut with a retelling of real-life events from 1828, Iceland, when Agnes Magnusdottir and two others are convicted and sentenced to death in a brutal double murder thought to have been motivated by greed and jealousy. The murderers were servants, assistants, and sometime lovers to one of the victims, wealthy and well-known herbalist and healer Natan Ketilsson. As Iceland's primitive prison system is ill equipped to house death row inmates, a local farm family is prevailed upon to board Agnes until the date of her execution. They are also expected to extend hospitality to the Assistant Reverend Thorvardur (Toti) Jonsson, whom Agnes chooses as a spiritual adviser. Over many chilly months, with Agnes working alongside the farmer's wife and daughters in their fields and close living quarters, her version of events emerges. As her story unfolds, her hosts' fear and loathing turn to empathy and understanding. VERDICT In the company of works by Hilary Mantel, Susan Vreeland, and Rose Tremain, this compulsively readable novel entertains while illuminating a significant but little-known true story. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/18/13.]. Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. 336p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
|
| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 09/01/2013 |
| Iceland might be a swinging place now, but it wasn't so in the 1820s. People lived on farmsteads that only survived through endless toil. Everything was filthy; the country was chilly even in summer; and society was ruled by a joyless, punitive piety. The death penalty consisted of being separated from your head via order of His Majesty in Denmark. Such is the setting for Australian writer Hannah Kent's dark but humane first novel, Burial Rites. Agnes Magnoesdottir is a pauper and serving woman who's been arrested and condemned to death for the murder of her employer and lover, Natan, a man looked upon by the country folk as a shady character--his very name is a play on the name Satan, it's said. To be fair, he is miserably cruel. He hits Agnes and never considers her as anything more than a comfort woman. He has a baby with another woman and sleeps with the other serving girl. But Agnes, who narrates much of the otherwise third-person narrative, remains in love with Natan. So why would she murder him? And if she didn't kill him, why doesn't she proclaim her innocence? Because there are no prisons in their region of Iceland, Agnes is sent to live with the family of a district officer. This isn't as comfortable as it sounds, for the family at the farm at Kornsa are only a tad less poor than other local farmers. The officer's consumptive wife, MargrZt, resents Agnes' invasion of her home, until her own natural goodness and maternal instincts take over. But the younger daughter loathes Agnes, while the older is strangely drawn to her almost from the beginning. Added to the mix is the callow assistant reverend, nicknamed Toti, whom Agnes calls upon to be her confessor and who quickly becomes fascinated with her. Kent has a sturdy grasp of place and history, as well as a talent for creating memorable characters--from MargrZt's family to their eternally pregnant and gossipy neighbor and the uncertain and smitten young priest. And, of course, Agnes. In this day and age, it's not politically correct to admire a woman who's in thrall to a brute like Natan, but there's no doubt of Agnes' strength of character, her wisdom and practicality (in things other than love) and her essential, vulnerable humanity. Based on a true story, Burial Rites gives us a vivid portrayal of a distant time and land that still somehow feels familiar. Arlene McKanic. 336pg. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
|
| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 03/18/2013 |
| At age 26, Australian Ph.D. student Kent won the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award and has since seen rights for her work sold to at least 18 countries after heated bidding. Drawing on real-life events, she retells the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, who was convicted of murder in 1829 Iceland. Agnes is at first shunned by the farming family she must live with as she awaits execution, but as she begins a frantic confession family members come to realize that there is another side to her story. 336p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
|
| Publishers Weekly | 06/17/2013 |
| Kent's debut delves deep into Scandinavian history, not to mention matters of storytelling, guilt, and silence. Based on the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the novel is set in rural Iceland in 1829. Agnes is awaiting execution for the murder of her former employer and his friend, not in a prison--there are none in the area--but at a local family's farm. Jon Jonsson, the father, grudgingly accepts this thankless task as part of his responsibility as a regional official, but his wife and daughters' reactions range from silent resentment to outright fear. After settling in to the household, Agnes requests the company of a young priest, to whom she confesses parts of her story, while narrating the full tale only to the reader, who, like the priest, "provide her with a final audience to her life's lonely narrative." The multilayered story paints sympathetic and complex portraits of Agnes, the Jonssons, and the young priest, whose motives for helping the convict are complicated. Kent smoothly incorporates her impressive research-- for example, she opens many of the chapters with documents that come directly from archival sources--while giving life to these historical figures and suspense to their tales. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House. (Sept.). 336p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
|
9780316243919,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 09/29/2013 |
|
|
|