Cost:                 $30.00 includes admission & finger food.

                         Beverages at bar prices.

When:               Wednesday 19th June, 7.30pm

Book Deal:        Buy the book & ticket together for $45.

                         This means you get the beautiful Burial Rites

                         (RRP $32.99) for just $15….less than half price!

                         *Only at time of ticket purchase

                         *Only one specially priced book per ticket

**Phone credit card bookings accepted**

Phone: 9589 4638

E-mail: read@beaumarisbooks.com.au

Iceland, 1829. In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnúsdóttir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal Jónsson, his wife and their two daughters. Horrified to have a convicted murderess in their midst, the family avoidsmurder of her lover. Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to her execution on the farm of District Officer Jón speaking with Agnes. Only Tóti, the young assistant reverend appointed as Agnes’s spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her, as he attempts to salvage her soul. As the summer months fall away to winter and the hardships of rural life force the household to work side by side, Agnes’s ill-fated tale of longing and betrayal begins to emerge. And as the days to her execution draw closer, the question burns: did she or didn’t she? 

Based on a true story, Burial Rites is a deeply moving novel about personal freedom: who we are seen to be versus who we believe ourselves to be, and the ways in which we will risk everything for love. In beautiful, cut glass prose, Hannah Kent portrays Iceland’s formidable landscape, where every day is a battle for survival, and asks, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others? 

‘I needed to reach into the dark and grasp the thing that was haunting me: to exorcise Agnes' presence from my subconscious. Burial Rites is that exorcism. It is my dark love letter to Iceland, to her history, and her people.’ Hannah Kent, 2012

HANNAH KENT won the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her manuscript Burial Rites, and was mentored by Geraldine Brooks. She is the co-founder and deputy editor of Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings, and teaches Creative Writing and English at Flinders University, where she is also completing her PhD. In 2011 she was a judge of Melbourne University/The Australian Centre’s Peter Blazey Fellowship for Life Writing. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in The Big Issue, Australian Book Review, The Wheeler Centre, Kill Your Darlings and Voiceworks, amongst others.