Along with Maren, her other most prominent female character is Ursa, or Ursula, the commissioner’s young and new wife, who he has had the good fortune to acquire in Bergen, via her father, who owns the ship that carries them north. The Sámi are suspected of wind-weaving, sorcery, in the region, and Millwood Hargrave blends such narrow 17th century mindsets as this with the more complex realities of a mixed community at the edges of, and in overlapping, lands. Erik’s wife, Diinna, is Sámi, known as a Lapp in certain derogatory circles, headstrong and not Christian and so, when the commissioner begins taking a census of kirke-goers and Diinna’s name is absent, the latter is imperilled. Maren is twenty years old when we first meet her, betrothed to Dag, who dies in the storm along with her father and her younger brother Erik. So it is that Millwood Hargrave develops a rising tension as the community starts to fracture into cliques, the pious kirke-women and the others, as the claustrophobic fear of persecution and execution simmers and begins to break relationships beyond repair. Commissioner Absalom Cornet immediately installs his presence in the local kirke (church), in strict expectation of the women’s religious obedience, but what is not apparent to the main characters on his arrival is that he is, in fact, appointed as a witch-hunter. Their lives are unsettled again, later in 1619, after they have largely re-found their feet, when a commissioner is sent to them by the Lensmann of the locality. The women - wives and those betrothed, daughters and mothers - are left in shock and must fend for themselves, learning to fish, for example (as the men were doing when the storm came). The Mercies (Picador, 2021) builds from late December, 1617, when a sudden sea storm takes the lives of forty men, practically all the menfolk of a small community, off the island of Vardø, Finnmark, at the very far northeast of Norway. Compassion must resist the ever-increasing scourge of suspicion, persecution and a skewed religious entrapment, brought about by the male power of the king, his church and his enforcers.

With origins in a true event of natural disaster, the ‘mercies of God’ - in the 17th century far and remote north - that apparently transpire are of questionable pertinence: that is, after the loss of a significant proportion of a small community, what mercy has been bestowed exactly? Liberties have been taken in the chronology of fictional accounts based on historical records, as has been noted by the author, but the heart of her writing is based more in the granular detail of relationships: especially as the vast majority of the survivors are women, who must now all live with and support, or otherwise, one another, and survive.

The mercies kiran