Slavery

The year is 1627, Shakespeare is but a decade in his grave and Charles 1 in the second year of his reign. It was an annus horribilis for the people of Iceland, then a Danish protectorate. In two raids that summer, slave traders in their corsairs from Algiers, led by two renegade Dutchmen, brutally attacked settlements along Iceland's southern coast, in particular in the Westman Islands, killing dozens, burning villages and eventually carrying off 400 Icelanders to be sold into slavery in the markets of Algiers, an audacious round-trip journey of 5,400 miles under sail; 400 human souls represented 1% of Iceland's sparse population at the time, and even today its population is only 364,000

Sally Magnusson is the author a wonderful novel, which brings vividly to life the surroundings and experiences of those captive slaves. The Sealwoman's Gift is imaginatively conceived, beautifully written and carefully researched.  She marries the bares bones of the historical record to a fully realised and thoroughly believable 17th century world. Her story spans the impoverished wind-swept landscape of dour Lutheran Iceland and the luxuriant cosmopolitan Islamic diaspora of Moors and Arabs in North Africa, and the narrative is colourfully embellished with many stories and sagas from both those cultures. She writes simply but with poetic intensity and in a few sentences can transport you almost physically into the sights, smells and sounds of her scenes and into the very presence of the men and women she so finely and sensitively observes.

The dramatic events of those times are seen through the eyes, thoughts and lived experiences of Åsta, a remarkable Icelandic woman at the centre of the story and a talented story-teller herself. This slice of history is vividly depicted from a woman’s point of view, one which is so often neglected in the telling of our past. There are many engrossing themes, especially the importance of story-telling, the meaning of love: How do you measure it? and loss: What price must you pay for losing your children forever, even losing the prospect of meeting them in heaven?