num_pages: 360
description: 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 sta the pastor's wife. Enslaved in an alien Arab culture sta 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.
language: English
title: The Sealwoman's Gift
publisher: Two Roads