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Books Like Burial Rites
Historical Fiction Like Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Hannah Kent's Burial Rites places you in an Icelandic farmhouse in the winter of 1829, waiting with Agnes Magnúsdóttir for her execution. These 8 novels share its winter atmosphere, its intimate portraiture of condemned women, and its sense that official history has buried the truth of ordinary lives.
- 1Buy
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
Grace Marks, convicted of murder in 1843 Canada, tells her story to the doctor hired to assess her mental state — the obvious companion to Burial Rites: another historical novel about a woman convicted of murder whose guilt is ambiguous, whose testimony is controlled by men, and whose inner life resists the official narrative; Atwood and Kent share a commitment to recovering the experience of women the historical record has defined as monsters
- 2Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Five sisters in suburban Michigan kill themselves and the boys obsessed with them try to reconstruct their lives from fragments — Eugenides's novel shares Burial Rites' structure of a male narrator attempting to recover a female experience through incomplete evidence, and its sense that the women at the center of the investigation remain irreducibly mysterious despite the accumulation of testimony
- 3Buy
People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
A rare book conservator traces the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah through five centuries of European history — Brooks's novel shares Burial Rites' interest in the past recovered through material evidence, in lives that the historical record has preserved only in fragments, and in the women and men who lived within the constraints of their time
- 4Buy
The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
The building of a Gothic cathedral in twelfth-century England, told through the interlocking stories of a master builder, a prior, and an outcast family — Follett's epic shares Burial Rites' immersion in a historical period through meticulous research and its interest in ordinary people living within the constraints of institutional power; different in scale (Burial Rites is intimate, Pillars is panoramic) but equally committed to historical accuracy
- 5Buy
The Last Runaway
by Tracy Chevalier
An English Quaker woman emigrates to antebellum Ohio and must navigate her new community's relationship to the Underground Railroad — Chevalier's novel shares Burial Rites' interest in a woman transplanted to an unfamiliar community and forced to define herself within its constraints, and in the ordinary texture of historical domestic life
- 6Buy
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
Thomas Cromwell's rise in the court of Henry VIII — Mantel's masterpiece shares Burial Rites' commitment to recovering the interior life of historical people through rigorous research and imaginative empathy, and its interest in the exercise of power over the powerless; where Kent focuses on a single condemned woman, Mantel focuses on the man who serves the king who condemns people like her
- 7Buy
The Weight of Water
by Anita Shreve
A photographer researching the 1873 murders of two Norwegian immigrant women in the Isles of Shoals discovers parallels between the historical case and her own present — Shreve's novel shares Burial Rites' interest in a violent case involving women who left incomplete historical records, and its dual-timeline structure of present-day investigation and historical reconstruction
- 8Buy
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
by Elizabeth George Speare
A Barbadian girl transplanted to a Puritan Connecticut community in 1687 befriends an old Quaker woman accused of witchcraft — Speare's classic shares Burial Rites' interest in a community's response to a woman it cannot categorize and its sense of the distance between official condemnation and human reality; recommended for younger readers or those who want a less harrowing version of the same territory
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