The Seawoman's Gift by Sally Magnusson

Book Review

Given my love of the sea and the stories of the Selkie people, how could I resist this one. Starting in Iceland where we find the main characters settled in a busy, yet hard life, we travel with them to Algiers where they will become slaves with only their stories to comfort them.

Here’s the blurb:

In 1627 Barbary pirates raided the coast of Iceland and abducted some 400 of its people, including 250 from a tiny island off the mainland. Among the captives sold into slavery in Algiers were the island pastor, his wife and their three children. Although the raid itself is well documented, little is known about what happened to the women and children afterwards. It was a time when women everywhere were largely silent.

In this brilliant reimagining, Sally Magnusson gives a voice to Ásta, the pastor's wife. Enslaved in an alien Arab culture Ásta meets the loss of both her freedom and her children with the one thing she has brought from home: the stories in her head. Steeped in the sagas and folk tales of her northern homeland, she finds herself experiencing not just the separations and agonies of captivity, but the reassessments that come in any age when intelligent eyes are opened to other lives, other cultures and other kinds of loving.

The Sealwoman's Gift is about the eternal power of storytelling to help us survive. The novel is full of stories - Icelandic ones told to fend off a slave-owner's advances, Arabian ones to help an old man die. And there are others, too: the stories we tell ourselves to protect our minds from what cannot otherwise be borne, the stories we need to make us happy.

This is not a black and white story of slave traders on one side and slaves on the other. It is placed in a time when the slave trade was rife and that many were taken from across the world and held ransom until their governments paid up or they simply died from neglect and hard labour.

Within the story are complex characters with a blurring of right and wrong in the middle of a clashing of cultures with both sides having clear motivation and knowledge that they are doing the right thing and the best thing in the circumstances.

Magnusson also weaves in Icelandic folktales and even compares the character of Asta to Scheherazade from The 1001 Nights. I’m not sure how successful that comparison is but the analogy serves to show how stories can help us through the very worst times in our lives, providing ways of communicating when all other ways have broken down.

The riddle at the end of the book is just perfect and, as with all good stories, it leaves you to decide yourself the lesson in the tale.

This is a great book which uses fiction to tell difficult stories with just enough history woven in to create an authentic narrative that carries you from the grey coast of Iceland to bright white cities of the Algiers and back again.

You can buy The Sealwoman’s Gift in all good bookshops. If you would like to buy a copy online, please consider visiting my page on Bookshop.org where I have gathered some of the books I read and recommend. Here you will find a plethora of myth, legend and folktale.

And don’t forget to support your local library too. See if they have a copy to borrow.