Join us for an evening with author, poet and playwright Kiran Millwood Hargrave as she talks about her new novel The Mercies, already tipped as one of the books to read in 2020!
On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardo is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardo wiped out in an instant.
Now the women must fend for themselves.
Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilized world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardo to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardo, and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty and terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs.
Inspired by the real events of the Vardo storm and the 1621 witch trials, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s 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.
The Mercies is storytelling at its most masterful – get ready to be transported across hundreds of years and thousands of miles to a tiny Norwegian island as Kiran Millwood Hargrave throws us into the lives and passions of her extraordinary cast of characters. We love this book and can’t wait to welcome Kiran to Oswestry!
The Mercies is our Book of the Month for February 2020. An Independent Bookshop Exclusive Edition of the book is being published and will be available at the event.
Tickets: £7 (redeemable against a signed copy of The Mercies). Tickets available from the bookshop or purchase online with booking fee.