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It is 1836 and the Prussian village of Kay is one of the country’s last Lutheran outposts – an island of old faith in a merciless sea of Calvinist reform. The local pastor has been banished,and the church doors are bolted shut. The congregation meets for furtive services in the pine forest,and year after year the elders petition the government for permission to leave,to find a place to worship in freedom.

Hannah Kent loves meeting readers on book tours “so much”.

In this world of faithful certainty – of “whitewash and wood shingle” – our teenage narrator,Hanne Nussbaum,is teetering on the sharp edge of womanhood. Other girls her age are eager for the changes to come,filling their hope chests with conscientious little needlepoints and dreaming of husbands,but to Hanne,the softening of her body feels like a kind of erasure.

When Hanne encounters ghostly Thea,a new arrival to Kay,their friendship is immediate,vehement,exultant:a mutual recognition. But there’s something charged about their connection,something fraught,and Hanne knows it.

“I wanted to tell Mama all the strange,small things I found pleasing about Thea,” she remembers,“and simultaneously understanding in some deep unexamined way that I must never tell her,that I must hold these tiny things under my tongue and keep them to myself.”

There’s no question that Hanne and Thea will be parted; Devotion is a novel of old longings (and relentless foreshadowing). But what will be the instrument of their separation? Will it be the whispers about Thea’s mother,with her strange tinctures and incantations? Or the interference of Hanne’s parents,brittle with grief for a lost child? Perhaps some doe-eyed farm boy with a marriage proposal? Or will the girls be caught together in the pinewoods?

When the Prussian government grants the Lutherans permission to emigrate to South Australia (as many did in the late 1830s),Hanne and Thea prepare for their new Adelaide lives,but Thea is wracked with dreams of shipwrecks. We can feel it brewing – that wrenching,severing moment – the moment Hanne calls “the great hinge of my existence”. It would be churlish to ruin it,an act of critical vandalism. But inDevotion’s yearning second half,away from the oppressive Prussian dark – and kept away from Thea – the novel shape-shifts. Hanne’s stolid and dutiful piety gives way to something more sensual and wild,and her stolid and dutiful narrative does the same.

Now there is room for Kent to do what she does best:reverence and rapture,otherworldly echoes,and a desire that is distinctly,deliciously female:“I allowed myself to consider the possibility of different devotions ...” Hanne confides,“I considered the weight of a plain ripe pear in hand,the promise of juice down my wrist.”

Hanne can hear nature’s music. Every creature has its own song,she insists – every tree and river way. In Australia,lonely Hanne hears a new chorus:“The sound of this country is one long sustained note that does not end,” she explains. “It is a humming that holds all the other music of this place in harmony. Every other sound is threaded upon it.”

With this ancient sound in her ears,Hanne’s is uniquely attuned to the damage her settler kin do to Peramangk and Kaurna land. She can hear the trees they rip from their roots,the blood-hungry kittens they set loose into the bush,the European crops they plant (“All this way and they have disfigured the land back to Prussia”).

And soDevotion becomes a tale of the refiguring might of faithful hearts;of love that sustains and love that ruins;of exile and dominion. “Why do men bother with churches at all when instead they might make cathedrals out of sky and water?” Hanne wonders. “Better a chorus of birds than a choir. Better an altar of leaves.” Amen.

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