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Verdict: The best-loved book on this list and the one most likely to break you — a real 1617 storm, a real witch hunt, and a love story that arrives late, stays quiet, and does not survive the ending intact.
Best for: Readers who want beautiful prose, a genuinely researched atrocity, and a sapphic relationship rendered as a small warm thing inside something enormous and cold — and who can take a devastating close.
Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — physical and tender but restrained; romance.io does not catalogue it and assigns no steam band)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — a 4.01 Goodreads average across 56,000 ratings, one of the two highest-rated books on this list)
Tropes: Historical fiction, witch trials, slow burn, forbidden love, isolated community, religious persecution, marriage of convenience, grief, found sisterhood, no HEA.
The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a standalone 2020 novel and her first for adults — literary historical fiction rather than historical lesbian romance — set on the Norwegian island of Vardø after a single storm drowned nearly every man in the settlement, and in the witch hunt that followed a few years later.
It holds a 4.01 average across roughly 56,000 Goodreads ratings, 4.02 on StoryGraph and 4.3 on Amazon with only 3% of readers giving it one or two stars — by the numbers, one of the two best-loved books on this list. It is also the one whose ending readers argue about hardest, and both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.
What Is The Mercies About?
The history is real and worth stating plainly, because the novel does not exaggerate it. On Christmas Eve 1617 a storm struck the coast of eastern Finnmark in northern Norway; ten boats went down and forty men drowned, most of the adult male population of Vardø, while the women watched from the shore. Four years later the witch trials began. Vardø became the centre of one of the most concentrated witch hunts in Europe, and across Finnmark roughly 150 people were executed for sorcery between 1621 and 1663. The Steilneset Memorial, opened in 2011 and designed by Peter Zumthor with an installation by Louise Bourgeois in her final major work, commemorates ninety-one of them.
Into that Hargrave puts two women. Maren Magnusdatter loses her father, brother and fiancé in the storm and spends the next eighteen months in a village where the women have had to learn to fish, butcher and survive without permission. Ursa arrives from Bergen as the new wife of Absalom Cornet, a Scottish commissioner brought in to bring the island back to godliness — which in practice means finding witches. Ursa cannot cook, cannot keep a house, and does not know what her husband does. Maren teaches her.
What Makes This Historical Novel Work
- The premise: A village of women, forced into competence by a mass drowning, then punished for it. Kirkus called it a chilling tale of religious persecution served with a feminist bite, and that is exactly the mechanism.
- The prose: Kirkus singled out clean, gripping sentences and an author wonderfully tuned to the gestures of a taciturn people, and readers name the writing as the reason to keep going.
- The history: Sourced, specific and unembellished — the storm, the trials, the persecution of the indigenous Sámi, all of it documented rather than invented.
- The domestic teaching: Maren showing Ursa how to keep a house is the whole romance, and it is far more charged than a description of it suggests.
- The reach: 56,000 Goodreads ratings and only 3% at one or two stars on Amazon. Very few sapphic-centred historical novels travel this far.
Book Synopsis
On Christmas Eve 1617 the women of Vardø watch a storm take the sea and the sky and every boat on it. Forty men drown within sight of the shore, among them Maren Magnusdatter’s father, her brother and the man she was to marry. What is left is a village of women, a handful of boys, and a winter coming.
They survive it by doing the work themselves. Some of them fish, which is not what women do. Some of them keep to the kirk and disapprove. The Sámi families among them, already regarded as suspect, become more suspect still. For eighteen months Vardø runs itself, badly and then adequately, and the women discover what they are capable of without anyone to give them leave.
Then Absalom Cornet arrives from Scotland, where he has burned women before, with a commission to bring the island to order. He brings a wife: Ursa, a merchant’s daughter from Bergen who has never gutted a fish or lit a fire, married off at speed and shipped north into a house with a dirt floor. Maren is sent to help her. What grows between them across a Finnmark winter is the only warmth in the book — and Absalom is already making a list.
My Review
Hargrave has done something difficult here, which is to write a novel about a real atrocity that never feels like it is using the atrocity. The storm is documented. The trials are documented. The persecution of the Sámi is documented. She adds two women to a history that had plenty of real ones, and the addition does not cheapen it, because the book is fundamentally about the same thing the trials were about: a community of women who managed without men for eighteen months, and the state’s decision that this was intolerable.
The prose is the reason people finish it. Kirkus praised the clean, gripping sentences and the ear for a taciturn people, and the descriptions of ice, weather, gutted fish and a village in the dark are the passages readers quote. Publishers Weekly called it a potent novel. It is not perfect — a real minority of readers find the writing overly descriptive and emotive, and say it pushes them out of scenes rather than into them — but the majority verdict is clear, and the 4.01 average across 56,000 ratings is not an accident.
Where it will frustrate this site’s readers specifically is the romance, and I want to be precise about it. Maren and Ursa do not meet until past page 100. What follows is charged, tender and completely convincing, but it is a strand rather than a spine — one reviewer described the horror of the trials as having been made a backdrop to the love story, and others describe the love story as a background to the horror, which tells you the two never quite integrate. Library Journal, praising the book, called it slow paced and deliberate, as if dreading its own unhappy denouement, and that is a fair description of the middle. If you are reading for the relationship, you will spend a third of the book waiting for it and the last third watching it be destroyed.
One expectation to set, and it is the most important sentence in this review. This is not a happy ending and it is not a bittersweet one in the usual sense. Both women survive, and they are separated — permanently, by circumstances I will not spoil. Reader reactions divide sharply: one describes being left with characters entirely bereft of hope and asks why the author could not have imagined a different outcome; another simply says the patriarchy wins. A counter-camp finds real meaning in the tragedy. Nobody I found described a reunion. If you need two women to end up together, this is not your book, and it is better to know that now than at page 340.
My honest note: The best-written book on this list and the one that will hurt most. Read it for the storm, the village and the history, and go in knowing the love story is a candle in a very large dark room.
| Element | In The Mercies |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Maren Magnusdatter & Ursa Cornet — a fisherman’s daughter who lost everyone to the sea and the commissioner’s wife she is sent to teach |
| Core tropes | Historical fiction, witch trials, slow burn, forbidden love, isolated community, religious persecution, marriage of convenience, grief |
| Setting | Vardø, Finnmark, northern Norway, 1617–1621 — a fishing island after a storm took its men, and the witch hunt that followed |
| Heat level | 2/5 — physical and tender but restrained; romance.io does not catalogue it |
| Series | Standalone — no series and no sequel; everything resolves |
| Content notes | Mass drowning, religious persecution and witch trials, execution by burning, torture, rape and sexual violence, misogyny, miscarriage, domestic abuse, racism and xenophobia toward the Sámi, grief and parental death |
How Explicit Is The Mercies?
A 2 out of 5. romance.io does not catalogue the book, so there is no steam band to cite; what there is, is restraint. Library Journal described the two women as drawn together by both necessity and physical attraction, and that is accurate — the attraction is physical and the book does not pretend otherwise, but the writing stays brief and oblique, and StoryGraph’s readers log sexual content at 26 mentions against 145 for death. This is a novel about touch in a place with no privacy, and it is written accordingly.
What genuinely needs flagging is everything else. StoryGraph’s graphic warnings are led by death, religious bigotry, murder, misogyny and rape, in that order and by very large margins, with torture, miscarriage and burning close behind. This is a book about a witch hunt and it does not look away from what a witch hunt was. For the same historical weight with more of the relationship on the page, Cantoras is the closer fit on this site.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you read for prose above everything, you want historical fiction that treats real atrocity seriously, you like a slow accumulation rather than incident, and you can finish a book that does not console you.
You may want to skip it if: you need an HEA, you want the relationship to be the spine rather than a strand, a slow middle will lose you, or witch-trial violence and sexual violence are not what you can read right now.
In short: the best-written and best-loved book on this list, and the one whose ending readers are still angry about.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
Six years on, this is one of only two books on this list that genuinely broke out. It has 56,000 Goodreads ratings — second only to The Safekeep on this list — and holds a 4.3 on Amazon with just 3% of readers at one or two stars, which is one of the strongest distributions in this whole guide. Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal all reviewed it positively, though none of the three starred it, and it sits at number 24 in Amazon’s LGBTQ+ Historical Fiction chart six years after publication. The Lesbrary reviewed it in February 2020. What it has not attracted is much of the rest of the sapphic circuit: LezReviewBooks and Autostraddle both return nothing for it on their own site searches, which is odd for a book this widely read and probably reflects that it is shelved and marketed as literary historical fiction first.
The audiobook is narrated by Jessie Buckley — the Academy Award-nominated actress — across 11 hours 6 minutes, and it is among the best-cast narrations on this list.
Prefer audio? Listen to The Mercies on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The prose, first and most consistently, with Kirkus’s praise for clean, gripping sentences echoed by readers who name the writing as the thing that carries them. Then the premise: a village of women surviving a mass drowning is a real historical situation most readers have never encountered, and several say they finished the book having learned about the Vardø trials and the persecution of the Sámi. The atmosphere — ice, dark, weather, the sea as a permanent threat — draws near-universal credit. And a real constituency defends the ending precisely because it is unsparing, arguing that a novel about this history has no business offering comfort.
What readers argue about and complain about: The romance arriving late, above everything for this audience — three independent reviewers make the point, one noting the two leads do not even meet until past page 100, and others describing the relationship as a backdrop rather than the substance. Second: pacing, with three readers and Library Journal all describing the book as slow and deliberate through the middle. Third: the prose, which is genuinely split — at least two named reviewers find it overly descriptive and emotive and say it repeatedly pushed them out of the moment, against the majority who call it the best thing in the book. Fourth, and loudest: the ending. Four reviewers describe it as devastating, with the sharpest calling it one of the worst conclusions they had read and another asking why the author did not imagine her way to a different outcome. That is not a complaint about craft; it is a complaint about being hurt, which is a different thing and worth reading as such.
The standalone question worth asking first: this is a standalone, it resolves completely, and there is no sequel. The thing to know before starting is the ending’s shape rather than its detail: both Maren and Ursa survive the novel, and they are separated at the close — permanently. This is not a bittersweet-but-together ending and it is not a tragedy of the kill-your-gays kind either; it is a separation, and the book treats it as the cost of the world it has described. Hargrave has continued writing for adults since, but nothing returns to Vardø.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Mercies have a happy ending?
No. Both Maren and Ursa survive the novel, but they are separated permanently at the close. Reader reactions divide sharply between finding the ending unbearable and finding it necessary, and nobody describes it as happy.
Is The Mercies a sapphic romance?
It has a sapphic relationship, but it is literary historical fiction rather than a romance. The two women do not meet until past page 100, the relationship is a strand rather than the spine, and there is no romantic resolution.
Is The Mercies based on a true story?
Yes, substantially. A storm on Christmas Eve 1617 drowned forty men from Vardø, and the Finnmark witch trials followed, with roughly 150 people executed for sorcery in northern Norway between 1621 and 1663. The Steilneset Memorial, opened in 2011, commemorates ninety-one of them.
How explicit is The Mercies?
A 2 out of 5. The attraction is physical and the book acknowledges it, but the writing is brief and oblique. romance.io does not catalogue the book, and StoryGraph’s readers log sexual content far below death, persecution and violence.
Is there an audiobook of The Mercies?
Yes — narrated by Jessie Buckley, running 11 hours 6 minutes. It is one of the strongest narrator castings on this list.
If You Loved The Mercies, Read These Next
For the same story of women surviving a hostile state together, with a warmer resolution, Cantoras is the closest match on this site and the one I would hand over first. If it was the historical persecution and the queer life lived beneath it, Stone Butch Blues takes that into the twentieth century. And for a sapphic historical novel with the same weight of buried history but an ending that lets them stay, The Safekeep is the antidote.
For more in this register, browse our books like Fingersmith guide, the historical sapphic romance reading list, or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
The Mercies is the best-written book on this list and the one I would recommend most carefully. The premise is real, the research is exact, the prose is genuinely beautiful, and the argument — that a community of women managing without men was the actual crime — is made without a single speech. It is also slow through the middle, structurally lopsided for anyone reading it as a romance, and finished with a separation that a lot of readers have not forgiven. Worth it for almost everyone, provided you know what you are walking into. Check The Mercies on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, The Mercies ranks as outstanding literary historical fiction with a sapphic heart — beautifully written and historically serious, held back for this audience by a romance that arrives late and ends in separation, and best approached for the village and the history rather than for the couple.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ 4.01 average across 56,000 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Only 3% of Amazon ratings at one or two stars
- ✓ Only 3% did-not-finish on StoryGraph
- ✓ Ending leaves a real share of readers angry
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Charged and completely convincing once it starts
- ✓ Built out of teaching and daily survival
- ✓ Library Journal notes real physical attraction
- ✓ Leads do not meet until past page 100
Characters ★★★★☆ 4.2/5
- ✓ Maren carries grief without becoming grief
- ✓ Ursa’s uselessness is written with real sympathy
- ✓ The village women are individuated, not a chorus
- ✓ Absalom stays a function more than a man
Writing ★★★★☆ 4.3/5
- ✓ Kirkus praised clean, gripping sentences
- ✓ Publishers Weekly called it a potent novel
- ✓ Weather and ice are the standout passages
- ✓ A minority finds it overwritten and emotive
Emotional Impact ★★★★★ 4.5/5
- ✓ The storm sequence is unforgettable
- ✓ Real history gives every scene weight
- ✓ StoryGraph readers mark it dark, emotional, sad
- ✓ Several readers describe genuine distress
Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 2/5
- ✓ Physical attraction acknowledged, not staged
- ✓ Brief and oblique on the page
- ✓ romance.io does not catalogue it
- ✓ Sexual content far below violence on warnings
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Both women survive the novel
- ✓ Refuses false comfort about the history
- ✓ Standalone with nothing left pending
- ✓ They are separated permanently, and readers object
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ The prose rewards a slower second pass
- ✓ Buckley’s narration is superb
- ✓ Early scenes read differently after the trials
- ✓ The ending discourages a casual return
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