In a recent interview with Bookselling This Week,

"It was quite by accident that I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir. This time 10 years ago, I was living in a fishing village in the north of Iceland as an exchange student. I had left a hot, dry Australian summer to arrive in the bleak darkness of an Icelandic winter, where the sun never breached the mountainous horizon and the weather confined me indoors and compounded my homesickness. I spoke nothing of the language and while I would, in time, find my place in the small community of the town, I initially suffered from debilitating loneliness.

It was during this difficult time that I was driven through an area in the north called Vatnsdalur. It was, and still is, a remarkable place, stricken with the kind of beauty that unsettles something within you. As we passed through it, I commented on the bizarre hill formations that cluster at the mouth of this valley and was told that they formed the site of Iceland's last execution. Intrigued, I pressed my travelling companions for more information and was told that a woman called Agnes had been beheaded for her role in the 1828 murders of two men as they lay sleeping.

To this day, I don't completely understand why I became as immediately and deeply fascinated with this woman as I did. Perhaps the isolated place of her death reminded me of my own friendlessness. Throughout the rest of my exchange, I continued to ask questions about the crime and the execution, even as I shed my own despondency. Several years later, I decided to research her story in an attempt to answer the ongoing questions I harbored. Who was Agnes? Was she as monstrous as the records seemed to suggest, or had her life's course been warped by social, cultural, or political circumstances instead?"