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 late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief moment as they led me out of doors. I fell, my skirts in the mud, and I turned my face upwards as if in prayer. I could have wept from the relief of light.

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 let it all unravel.

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

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 produced landslides, that we become caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.

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

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 is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

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 distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.