Always Home, Always Homesick

Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent's first work of nonfiction, tracing her relationship with Iceland from her arrival as a bewildered, homesick seventeen-year-old exchange student in the winter of 2003 through the years of research and writing that produced her acclaimed debut novel, Burial Rites.

The memoir moves between Kent's teenage disorientation — sleeping off jet lag in the National Archives of Iceland on her first night, struggling with the language and the near-total winter darkness — and her later return to that same archive as a novelist chasing the true story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland. Along the way, Kent examines how a place can become a second home strong enough to make her homesick for it even while living in Australia, and what it means for a writer's most formative influence to come from outside her own country.

Framed as a book about place, memory, and the slow work of research, this is a reflective, personal account of the making of a novelist rather than a conventional travel memoir.