A colony of moss does not express preferences for certain people, living or dead. But if such a colony of moss did decide to reveal its favourites, let us just say this: You might be surprised.
In 2018, a young forensic scientist, homesick and adrift in the North of England, is heading to a coroner’s office to identify a body.
In 50 BCE, a female druid is travelling to a city in the South where she will appear before the new king.
And underfoot, all along, a teeming colony of moss is opening its wet mouth, waiting.
In this wonderfully strange, multi-layered story, the unexpected discovery of an ancient bog body becomes a pinprick of light in the depths of humanity’s history.
In 2018, a young forensic scientist, homesick and adrift in the North of England, is heading to a coroner’s office to identify a body.
In 50 BCE, a female druid is travelling to a city in the South where she will appear before the new king.
And underfoot, all along, a teeming colony of moss is opening its wet mouth, waiting.
In this wonderfully strange, multi-layered story, the unexpected discovery of an ancient bog body becomes a pinprick of light in the depths of humanity’s history.
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Reviews
Wise, beautifully written, and transcendent in feeling, Bog Queen is exactly the kind of novel I love. North deftly weaves between the past and present to show us the complicated and far-reaching web that connects us all through time and space
A lightning strike of a novel by a visionary storyteller. Bog Queen is an earthly meditation; a page-turning mystery; and a tale of power, profit, and dominion as old as time. Anna North is simply brilliant
I can't remember the last time a novel so moved and transfixed me. Bog Queen is infused with a profound wisdom about human ambition across the millennia-how enormous it has been, and also how insignificant-that seems to transcend human understanding, as if delivered by the old gods themselves. An absolute astonishment
With rich, elegiac prose, Anna North's Bog Queen travels between modern day England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe to ask what we owe the past, the earth, and ultimately, each other. A book of magic and healing