She smelt the blubber burning in the lamps before it stopped moving, long before the bright roll of its eye beneath her eye wore down to dullness. It bucking and all of them grim and holding like nets tight about a shoal, her arms growing long and strong around it-so wide and fierce she held it-until she didn’t know if she was a comfort or a menace and didn’t care, only watched its eye with her eye, not blinking.Įventually it stilled, its breath melting out as they hacked and sawed. They began to swing and cut before the whale was even dead. The men came scrambling down the black rock like dark, swift insects, glinting and hard-bodied with blades and scythes. There was nothing she could do for it but this. She climbed down the cliff to its heaving body and rested her eye against its eye, wrapped her arms across the great stinking swell.
Last night Maren dreamt a whale beached itself on the rocks outside her house. VARDØ, FINNMARK, NORTH-EASTERN NORWAY 1617 A haunting ode to self-reliant and quietly defiant women." (Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of Shuggie Bain) Read Excerpt It's a beautifully intimate story of friendship, love and hope. It totally swept me away to Vardø, where grief struck islanders stand tall in the shadow of religious persecution and witch burnings. " The Mercies has a pull as sure as the tide. Cornet brings with him the threat of danger-and a pretty, young Norwegian wife named Ursa.Īs Maren and Ursa 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. But the foundation of this new feminine frontier begins to crack with the arrival of Absalom Cornet, a man sent from Scotland to root out alleged witchcraft. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer-which they never did while the men were alive.
All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster.įor the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island.
Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. When the women take over, is it sorcery or power?įinnmark, Norway, 1617. Beautiful and chilling" (Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe). The women in an Arctic village must survive a sinister threat after all the men are wiped out by a catastrophic storm in this "gripping novel inspired by a real-life witch hunt.
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