Book Club #1 - Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

I had been wanting to start a book club with my friends for a while but like with most things I get super motivated about them at first then lack the get-up-and-go to actually see them through. I had been a part of a book group with some work mates a few years ago and I knew I'd at least have some people willing enough to spend some time nattering about books with me. In July I finally got around to doing one of those potentially cringy "who wants to do this thing with me" Facebook posts, the kind that can become super embarrassing if no one comments on them. To my surprise around 15 to my friends wanted to join me in my bookish endeavour! Such a literary bunch, my friends!

Thus book club 2.0 was born! We had our inaugural meeting this week at Tinderbox on Ingram Street, home of tasty coffee and even tastier cakes! It's such a great space and we managed to bag a great seating area complete with wingtipped chairs, how bookish. I picked our first read which was Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. I choose this book based on the good reviews I had read online and the fact that it was nominated for a few awards including the Guardian first book award and the Bailey's woman's prize for fiction.

Buriel Rites is set in northern Iceland in 1829, and centres around the real life character of Agnes Magnúsdóttir who is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of her lover. Agnes is sent to wait out her final months on the farm of district officer Jón Jónsson, his wife and their two daughters. Horrified to have a convicted murderer in their midst, the family avoid contact with Agnes. Only Tóti, the young assistant priest appointed as Agnes’s spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her. As the year progresses and the hardships of rural life force the household to work side by side, Agnes’s story begins to emerge and with it the family’s terrible realization that all is not as they had assumed.

The general consensus in our group was that we all really enjoyed the book! Personally I thought the book was incredibly well written, Kent has a really great lyrical prose style. There's a lot of allusions to mysticism and Icelandic sagas which I really enjoyed, as well as the very vivid and detailed passages about Iceland's landscape. Iceland is a character in it's own right under Kent's narration.  The character of Agnes is a real enigma and we had a hard time deciding if we believed her story as she tells it to the Jonsson's or not, she's a classic unreliable narrator.  Due to the uncertainty of the narrative, this book was ideal as a book club choice as someone else is guaranteed to pick up something from the text that you've missed while reading.

The only negative things that were brought up about this novel were that we all struggled with the Icelandic pronunciations of places and names while reading. The book does include a map at the start, which is helpful to refer to if you're struggling with geography. Also, each chapter beings with a pseudo-official report pertaining to different aspects of the murder case and some of us found this to be distracting, although personally I liked it.

All in all I would definitely recommend this book if you enjoy a good story with great characters. It was a little slow to begin with but picks up the pace halfway through. It's been publicised as a "whodunnit" however I think this is inaccurate marketing as this focuses more on one woman's struggle to find her place in a world that doesn't understand her.

Next month: Stoner by John Williams

Have you read this book? What is your book club reading? Let me know in the comments!!