Devotion
Devotion starts as a beautifully written historical novel, set in Prussia in the 1830s. Hanne is an outsider to her close-knit, highly religious community. Persecuted for their faith, the villagers cling together and only warily accept strangers. But Hanne—a dreamy girl whose affinity with nature is dismissed by her family as unimportant when set against a life of hard work and faith—finds a true friend in Thea. Their friendship blossoms in the forest around the village, despite the rumours of witchcraft that surround Thea’s mother, a midwife with a sixth sense for when a baby will be born and a mysterious book of herbal remedies. When the community make the awesome, six-month voyage across the sea to Australia, where they hope to be able to worship in freedom, the two girls are drawn ever closer together. What happens aboard ship, and later on a new continent, is both beautiful and terrifying to Hanne, our narrator.
Devotion is, at its name suggests, fundamentally a book about love in its many forms. At its heart is the exquisitely drawn relationship between Hanne and Thea, but it also explores with delicacy and depth the many different ways that mothers express their love to their children, the love between siblings, and the love of the natural world. The prose is superb, ringing with clarity and truth as well as intense beauty. It is also a book of surprises and marvels: a hymn to nature, to forests and the sea, and to the unexplored, unimagined wonders that may lie in store for us all. This is a magical, startling and memorable novel.
