Review: Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent's memoir, about a year long student exchange to Iceland and how it inspired her bestselling novel Burial Rites is absolutely fascinating from beginning to end. The author shares with the reader how, at age seventeen, she left Australia in the middle of summer and arrived in Iceland, a country so different from her own, in the middle of winter. There she would discover careless adults, new traditions, friends that would become family and, eventually, the story of Agnes Magusdottir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Some years later she would return to research the life of Agnes Magusdottir and turn it into a story that would become an award winning and bestselling novel. 

I enjoyed reading this for a number of reasons. First, like many Australians I find Iceland to be both fascinating and very far away. It was interesting to read and discover more about the real Iceland and how people live their day to day lives. Second, I loved the inside glimpse to how the author created such an awe-inspiring novel at a young age. Unsurprisingly the novel is very well written.

Overall, an insightful and interesting memoir, a real treat for book lovers.

Highly recommended.


PS: One thing that people ask me about all the time. I was on an author panel with Hannah Kent at a Love Your Bookshop Day event in 2013, around the time that Burial Rites was really starting to take off and I'd had some minor success with a self published YA novel, Behind the Scenes. We only spoke briefly (I was at one end of the table, and she was at the other,) and she was a very nice, genuine person. I've met her a couple of times since, and each time I'm never quite sure if she remembers me and I've always been too shy to say anything.

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