As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to….

I preferred to read than talk with the others..

How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was l….

I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland..

I don't want to be remembered, I want to be here!.

If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I'd be a sight more miserable than I am now.

A bubble of fear passes up my spine. It's the feeling of standing on ice and suddenly hearing it crack under your weight - both thrilling and terrify….

To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things..

No doves come from ravens’ eggs.

...dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush..

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me….

It’s not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself..

In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And theres thi….

I have made a mistake. They condemn me to death and I ask for a boy to coach me for it. A red-headed boy, who gobbles his buttered bread and toddles ….

It was only later that I suffocated under the weight of his arguments, and his darker thoughts articulated. It was only later that our tongues produc….

People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being ….

I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing Burial Rites, I was constantly trying to see whether I could di….

Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone's bones..

The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe..

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist..

I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow..