Kiran Millwood Hargrave

After the men in an Arctic Norwegian town are wiped out, the women must survive a sinister threat in this "perfectly told" 1600s parable of "a world gone mad" (Adriana Trigiani). Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a stranger arrives on their shore. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God, and flooded with a mighty evil. As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence. Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, The Mercies is a story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.

The Mercies

Jasper

Everything is made blurred and grey by the weather, and the commissioner's wife has set an uneasiness rocking inside her, though she can't name why. She feels she must know her. The yellow dress ghosts through Maren's daydreams: she had become obsessed with recalling it. How soft and giving the woven fabric was against her wrist as she pulled tight the coat, how bright it was, how much was gathered into its loose pleats, enough to wrap three people. The woman's sweet breath, her fingernails pale and delicate.

cedar winslow

"God provides," says Toril, though the ache in Maren's arm tells her it was not God but they who brought this catch home. 

There is no blessing so complete as bread.

The secret doesn't gnaw at her. Rather she feels strengthened by it, forged into something glittering and rare. 

The Mercies quotes

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