The first part of Hannah Kent’s memoir Always Home, Always Homesick spans the award-winning author’s early childhood in Adelaide through to her first trip to Iceland as a 17-year-old Rotary exchange student, in 2003. Aged four, Hannah is friendless, “illiterate in a common tongue of childhood”. In books, she finds refuge and relief. As a teenager, she is annoyed by adults’ talk of Atars, harbouring a grander aspiration: to awaken to the “divine mystery” of the world.
The promotional material for Always Home, Always Homesick frames Iceland as Kent’s muse, spurring not only her award-winning debut, Burial Rites, but also the literary practice that spawned subsequent novels The Good People and Devotion. And indeed, the place feels personified in this memoir. As though she were falling for a full-blooded human, the young Kent progresses from initial awkwardness in her new surrounds to physical infatuation, “euphoric sublimation” to its beauty, and eventually a kind of enmeshment: “My bones have knitted with this place.” Returning to Australia, she is beset by longing and grief.
