A sad event launches the novel. A mother dies in childbirth, leaving 10 children behind. Not an uncommon occurrence some hundred years ago.

The grief goes unmentioned. The father remarries. The children are divided, and their fates unfold in exceedingly different ways.

We are at the end of the 19th century, and all the tremors that plunged through religion, politics, the labour movement, and culture at the turn of the century, are merged into these fateful stories – for example the tyrannical Axel Fr. Moe, whom the Danish Inner Mission sent to the Faroe Islands.

One of the girls, who has great plans for her life, ventures off to a farm in order to serve and earn some cash, because the dream is to go abroad. The farmer rapes her, and a child is conceived. No one is told who the father is, but she is to live with the shame. We follow her on her lonely path to restitution after the misdeed.

It is a noble story in all stillness. A tender and emotional story of fate, which may as well have faded into all the others like it, but which now has been written into a fine novel.

The protagonist and her experiences are based on true events.

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Listen to Sólrún in NÓN 21/11/2019