Bog Queen
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- 89,00 kr
Publisher Description
'SPARKLES LIKE UNEARTHED TREASURE' KALIANE BRADLEY
'A MESMERISING NOVEL' OBSERVER
'AN IRIDESCENT CONTEMPORARY FOLKTALE' LUCY ROSE
Rich, wild and shimmering with mystery, Bog Queen is the new novel from Anna North, bestselling author of Reese's Book Club Pick Outlawed
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. But this body, found in a moss-layered bog, is not like any Agnes has seen before: its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, yet it is almost perfectly preserved.
Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past: the death of an Iron Age queen more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with numerous groups who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Meanwhile, underfoot, there's the land itself: the wet, teeming colony of moss has its own dark stories to tell.
As Agnes becomes tangled in controversies stirred up by her own discovery, she must face the deep history of what she has unearthed. In Bog Queen, the lives of two young women separated by many centuries become inextricably connected, as each learns to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious than either can imagine.
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.
