Picador announces Hannah Kent’s third novel, DEVOTION
Hannah Kent’s much-anticipated third novel, DEVOTION, will be published in the UK in February 2022.
Set in early-nineteenth century Prussia, DEVOTION tells the story of Hanne and her Lutheran family, who escape religious persecution by securing passage to the new colony of South Australia. Sharing the diabolical conditions of shipboard life is Hanne’s friend, Thea. By journey’s end, a bond has been forged that is so strong, nothing can break it. A shared existence in a new land is impossible – God, society and the natural order say so – but within the impossible, there is devotion.
Hannah Kent said:
‘'DEVOTION began as a desire to return to the light, after two previous novels which considered the dark. A curiosity about my German ancestors’ immigration to South AustraIia in the mid-nineteenth century met with a deeper creative impulse to represent and celebrate that which has so often been rendered invisible throughout history.'’
Hannah Kent’s first novel, the international bestseller, BURIAL RITES (2013), was translated into over 30 languages and won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, the ABA Nielsen Bookdata Bookseller’s Choice Award, the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award and the FAW Christina Stead Award. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. It is currently being adapted for film by Sony TriStar. Hannah’s second novel, THE GOOD PEOPLE (2016) was also translated into many languages and is currently being adapted for film by Aquarius Productions.
Image credit: Lauren Bamford
Burial Rites
In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnúsdóttir 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 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 Good People
by Hannah Kent
Set in County Kerry in Ireland in 1825, in The Good People Hannah Kent evokes the same powerful sense of place as she does in her first novel, Burial Rites.
Based on true events and set in a lost world bound by its own laws, The Good People follows the lives of three very different women – Nora, Mary and Nance – who are united by their mission to help one sick boy, Micheál, who they believe to be a changeling. Soon, their world of folklore and belief, of ritual and stories, tightens around them and leads them all down a dark and dangerous path . . .