Bog Queen
A Novel
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ESQUIRE
In the gorgeous new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of Outlawed, "a strangely well-preserved Iron Age body turns up in an English bog, and the American forensic anthropologist on the case is thrust into an absorbing, complex mystery" (People magazine).
When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she's ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.
Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there's the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.
As Agnes faces the deep history of what she has unearthed, she's also forced to question what she thought she knew about her talent, her self-reliance, and her place in the world. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with contemporary urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Inspired by the discovery of the preserved bog body called the Lindow Woman, this novel explores the collision between abstract goals and real peoples’ concerns. Agnes, a socially awkward but brilliant American anthropologist attached to the Ludlow coroner’s office in England, is asked to determine the cause of death of a body found preserved in a peat bog. It’s thought to be the victim in a decades-old cold case, but this woman died nearly 2000 years ago. Agnes believes she owes the body the courtesy of determining how she died. This brings her into conflict with the niece of the still-undiscovered murder victim, local environmentalists concerned about further damage to the bog, and the bog’s owners, who want to sell to developers. A parallel story is narrated by the Iron Age woman, a socially awkward but clever druid whose negotiations with a Romanized king puts her in conflict with the local warlord. And the moss colony in the bog also provides its own views on existence. Anna North’s thoughtful novel probes big questions in a way that’s both profound and relatable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The discovery of a woman's body in an English bog kicks off the piercing latest from North (Outlawed). It's 2018 and American forensic scientist Dr. Agnes Linstrom is tasked with identifying the remains, which are uncannily well-preserved. Though initially believed to be a murder victim from 1961, the body turns out to date back more than two millennia. Agnes needs more time to provide answers about who the woman was, but her work is complicated by interventions from a peat moss company eager to resume its harvesting in the area, and from environmental activists calling for a stop to Agnes's forensic digging. The chapters alternate between the perspectives of Agnes and the long-dead woman, a young druid leader who travels from her village near the bog to a settlement ruled by a king who has welcomed Roman influence, sometime around 50 BCE. As the druid returns home, she is badly wounded by a rival leader. Eventually, Agnes determines these wounds were not the cause of the druid's death. Part of the novel's thrill comes from the way in which North leaves the rest of the mystery for the reader to piece together, and Agnes's partial access to the truth is made even more poignant through the masterful depiction of how painfully out of sync she is with other people ("She spoke in what she thought was a normal and measured way... but every time she could see the senior professors sneaking sidelong looks at one another"). North reaches new heights with this brilliant novel.
