This is a big part of why I seek out novels set in places and times I haven’t read about yet. As I read it, I felt the cold and almost smelled the heather, damp, and unwashed clothing of Vardø. The Mercies is a highly atmospheric novel. Unfortunately, both seem equally powerless to stop what’s happening.

While Maren’s perspective shows us a village tearing itself apart, Ursula’s view provides context for what’s happening in the somewhat wider world. He’s been summoned because of his expertise at torturing confessions out of women who’ve been accused of being witches. It’s only much later that Ursula learns, to her horror, that her husband has been hired as a witchfinder.

She is the daughter of a formerly wealthy shipowner in Bergen, who suddenly finds herself married to a Scotsman who is on his way to Vardø to work for the local governor. Ursula Cornet, our other narrator, is an outsider. On the other, Maren’s mother sides with the women who mutter about witches. On the one hand, Kirsten’s practicality keeps the lot of them from starving and gives them a direction. Others, like Toril and Sigfrid, turn to the church and begin to believe that the devil and witches and especially the local Sámi people are to blame for the loss of the men. Kirsten Sørensdatter, for one, seems to relish the freedom and space that allows her to be a leader. Some of the women of Vardø grow more independent. After the 1617 storm, a village of women has to wrestle with their grief at the same time that they have to learn how to fish (purely a man’s job) before they starve. The village is poor, but it is an important outpost for whaling and fishing and keeping an eye on the Russian Empire. Maren Magnusdatter, one of two narrators of The Mercies, offers an insider’s view of life in Vardø. The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, is set in the years that follow the storm, as paranoia and racism conspire to kick off the deadliest wave of witch-hunting Norway ever experienced.

The women, children, and a few old men, are left to fend for themselves in the aftermath. On Christmas Eve, 1617, just as the men of Vardø, in Norway’s extreme north, were setting out to begin the day’s fishing, a terrible storm appeared and drowned them all. Everyone can agree that the storm came from no where.

The mercies novel