Always Home. Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

Posted by Ms K on July 20, 2025 in All | Leave a comment

Hello Flight Centre. Can you please book me a ticket to Iceland stat. I need to see it and maybe even live there.

Bold, I know but that, my friends, is what this memoir does to you.

If you love Hannah Kent (haven’t met anyone who doesn’t), you’ve probably read this beauty already and I’m the tardy one. I’ve adored everything she’s written but wasn’t sure a memoir was going to be my cup of hot Icelandic tea, but it was. I think Hannah Kent could write a description of toilet paper and I’d be happy to read it and review it.

This is the story of how Burial Rites came into being (along with teenage Hannah becoming adult Hannah). She arrives in Iceland as an exchange student and lives with three families who show her a side of the people and nation. But it is one family who brings it to life for her, and she falls deeply in love with it all (some of the food aside). She visits a memorial dedicated to Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman executed in Iceland and can’t escape Agnes from that moment onward.

If you are one of the 5 people on earth who hasn’t read Burial Rites, what are doing here reading our blog? Please remedy immediately. It is a haunting, extraordinary tale that launched Hannah Kent’s international career and she didn’t stop there going on to write The Good People and Devotion (loved both).

I am glad I read Burial Rites before I read this book. I don’t think it would have diminished Agnes’ story in any way if I’d read these in reverse, but I am glad to have read about her without the prequel. Reading the memoir shows exactly why Agnes was so powerfully portrayed though. She was ever present while Hannah Kent lived in Iceland, almost bursting through Hannah to have her story told. 

You won’t just read this memoir, you’ll feel the snow, the winds, the gasping expanse of Iceland. Every icicle and meadow flower are brought to life…. I am just thankful the rotten shark snack, considered a delicacy, was not.

But that is just my two cents worth.