A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
Welcome to LitReaderNotes, a book review blog. Find book suggestions, search for insights on a specific book, join a community of readers.
All tagged Norway
Kári Gískason’s The Sorrow Stone (2022) is a beautifully crafted historical fiction set in the 10th century. This novel adds to the growing body of historical fiction that builds on the stories of Nordic culture and the settlement of Iceland. Reading The Sorrow Stone transports the reader back through the centuries to a time of cold and hardship when revenge and duty weighed upon everyone, and when one woman is forced to face her past to save her son’s future.
Set predominately in the far northern town of Vardø, in Finnmark, Norway from 1617-1621, this is a novel punctuated by the harshness of both the natural world and human viciousness. The Mercies fictionalizes historical events. A devastating storm on Christmas Eve of 1617 killed nearly all of the town’s men; Hargrave begins her novel on that day. In the pages that follow she weaves two women’s stories together and The Mercies builds toward brutal witch trials in the years after the great storm.
