The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrave

• Hardback
• Condition: Very Good
• 342 pages
• Fiction: Historical

On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardø is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves - the menfolk wiped out in an instant.

Vardø is now a place of women.

Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilised world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardø to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place flooded with a terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs...

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, The Mercies is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and a love that may prove as dangerous as it is powerful.