Some women are better willing and able to take on “men’s work” than others, some rely more on the church for consolation than others, but everyone uses Sámi runes, dolls called “poppets” and talismans alongside Christian ritual. Encouraged by her friend Kirsten, Maren takes responsibility, in the months after the storm, for her mother, Sámi sister-in-law Diina and infant nephew – even going out to sea when the village runs out of fish. Maren is practical and skilled, among the first of the women to rise from the shock of grief to relight the fire, prepare food and then bring the men’s bodies from the shore. It’s a striking, uneasy beginning, but a prophetic dream is an odd foundation for a novel fundamentally opposed to superstition. The Mercies opens with a young woman, Maren, dreaming of drowning in the sea and burning at the same time while men hack a stranded whale to death on the beach. Kiran Millwood Hargrave … The Mercies has all the strengths of her children’s fiction: strong characters, gorgeous settings, a literary commitment to women’s lives, work and relationships with each other. A memorial by Louise Bourgeois and Peter Zumthor now stands on the site and was the touchpaper for this novel. Some of the widows were tried and burned at the stake.

John Cunningham, brought from Scotland to subdue the Finnmark region, oversaw 52 trials, and was particularly excited to find some of the Vardø women in the wake of their strange storm wearing men’s clothes to do men’s work and integrating local Sámi funerary traditions into their grieving. His primary target was the Sámi people of the far north, but hundreds of other Norwegian women were also executed.

In 1618, King Christian IV introduced laws against witchcraft modelled on those of James VI in Scotland.

None survived, and so for months the island’s women managed the fishing, building, reindeer herding and butchery as well as their usual domestic work. The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s first novel for adults, is set on the Norwegian island of Vardø, where in 1617 a Christmas Eve storm blew up while all the men were out fishing. Remote settlements, brutal weather and patriarchal violence offer a reflection in historical fiction of the fashion for feminist sci-fi dystopias. The region in an era of insecure theocracy seems to speak to anglophone writers interested in stories of feminist resistance. T here has been a vogue in the past few years for novels about gender and sexuality set in early modern Scandinavia: Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Sally Magnusson’s The Sealwoman’s Daughter, Caroline Lea’s The Glass Woman.

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave