Burial Rites: Hannah Kent's meticulously researched historical novel tells of the final months of the last woman executed in Iceland

Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent

The last case of capital punishment in Iceland was on 12 January 1830 with the double execution of supposed partners in crime Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Fridrik Sigurdsson. They were found guilty of murdering two men, Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson, whose bodies – each with wounds of a deliberate nature – were found in the burnt-out ruins of Ketilsson's farm. Magnúsdóttir was a workmaid at the farm along with Sigurdsson's intended, Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir, the third guilty party. She was the only one of the trio to escape the death penalty, seeing out her days in a Copenhagen textile prison.

The murders took place on the night between 13 and 14 March 1828, at Illugastadir, on the Vatnsnes peninsula in northern Iceland. Four months later, Magnúsdóttir, Sigurdsson and Gudmundsdóttir were found guilty in a district court and sentenced to be beheaded, with Gudmundsdóttir's sentence later commuted.

The Húnavatn district, in which they resided, was ill-prepared to hold the prisoners, so as the case progressed – first through the land court in Reykjavík, then the supreme court in Copenhagen for the king of Denmark's approval – it was decided that they would be "placed in farms, homes of upright Christians, who would inspire repentance by good example, and who would benefit from the work these prisoners do as they wait their judgment". So it was that Magnúsdóttir spent her final days with a family of dutiful Icelanders at a farm of Kornsá. This much is fact, a single gory interlude from the expanse of history, but Hannah Kent has turned Magnúsdóttir's story into fiction – her interpretation of the Illugastadir murders and Magnúsdóttir's fate informed by significant research.

She scoured ministerial records, parish archives and censuses – translated extracts of which appear at the beginning of each chapter. She read local histories and publications about the case, and spoke with Icelanders. All this research has paid off in spades: the end result is a novel so steeped in period detail that the extracts lifted from original sources sit eloquently alongside the fictionalised account, the transition between the two being effortlessly smooth.

Kent begins her novel with Magnúsdóttir's arrival at Kornsá, the "turf croft" home of Jón and Margrét and their daughters Steina and Lauga. Her hosts are resentful of the duty heaped on them and suspicious of their charge; the wait for her arrival is a "month of fear", tight "like a fishing line, hooked upon something that must inevitably, be dragged from the depths". Murderesses belong in the sagas, Margrét thinks, expecting Agnes to be beautiful but deadly, yet the woman dragged into her home looks more "like a new corpse, fresh dug from the grave. Wild black hair strung with grease, and the brown-grey of dirt sitting in the pores of her skin." No siren, just a "landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty", who was too free with her affection and undone by her jealousy.

A young preacher, Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson, is given the responsibility of preparing Magnúsdóttir to meet her maker, but rather than preach, he encourages her to speak about her past, providing her with "a final audience to her life's lonely narrative". At first she is reticent, but during the long winter nights, she begins to unburden herself, the real story of the murders eventually "boiling over", the telling of which leaves her tongue so tired "it slumps in my mouth like a dead bird, all damp feathers, in between the stones of my teeth". Burial Rites is a debut of rare sophistication and beauty – a simple but moving story, meticulously researched and hauntingly told.

Burial Rites
by Hannah Kent. 
Hardcover: 336 pages.
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (September 10, 2013). 
Language: English. 
ISBN-10: 0316243914. ISBN-13: 978-0316243919.

Source: The Guardian, August 27, 2013