Burial Rites

Burial Rites is a novel by the Australian writer Hannah Kent, published in 2013. It is based on the life of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland, and on the deaths that led to her sentence.

The book opens with Agnes sent to an isolated farm to wait for her execution, because the authorities need somewhere to keep her. The family obliged to house her is horrified by the arrangement and avoids her as much as the farm's work allows, which leaves her with Tóti, the priest she has chosen for herself and the only person who takes the trouble to ask about her life. Over the months of waiting she tells him about the household she served, the two men who died, and the circumstances that brought her to the point where the law was able to convict her of the murders.

Kent came across the story of Agnes Magnusdottir as a seventeen-year-old exchange student in Iceland and later made it the subject of her university research, and the novel keeps the weather, the farm work and the sense of a small, enclosed community at the centre of the telling.