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 aut...