dittybox

Iceland 1829.  Two men have been murdered and three people have been arrested then found guilty and sentenced to death.  One of the accused is a man in his late teens known to be a sheep-killer, the second is a young servant girl aged around fifteen and the third is Agnes, also a servant and in her late twenties. The verdicts have been sent to Copenhagen to be approved by the King, and while the local officials wait for authority to carry out the executions, the three prisoners are separated and Agnes is sent to live with a farmer's family in a remote croft.   This is no 'cosy crime' novel.  The words lie cold on the page as Agnes's story slowly unfolds, and there is very little to lift the dark atmosphere as the weather closes in for winter and the family must accept this potentially dangerous woman inside their croft.  Nothing is private when there is only one room to sit and sleep in, so when the priest comes to speak to Agnes and prepare her for her fat...

To look at Rory you would imagine he would have to wrap up well to go to the local garage to buy a Kit Kat, but do not let his outward appearance deceive you.  Rory is as physically resilient as a mountain dog, and endowed with such a sense of self confidence that he believed he could walk for twenty months across the mountains of Afghanistan, through the winter, and not get himself killed.  Sometimes he came close to getting killed; and at various times he was shot at, punched, had stones thrown at him, and was threatened by random men brandishing weapons left behind by the Russians and the Taliban.  Whenever anything like that happened, he squared up to his assailants and insisted he was a historian writing a book, and he had every right to be there as he was carrying letters from various leaders he had stayed with along the way. Rory is indeed an historian, and the purpose of his walk was to follow in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India.  He ...