Bog Queen - Anna North

'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.

''AN IRIDESCENT CONTEMPORARY FOLKTALE'' LUCY ROSE
''AN ABSOLUTE ASTONISHMENT'' VAUHINI VARA
''A LIGHTNING STRIKE OF A NOVEL'' JUNG YUN
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 ever seen: its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, yet it is almost completely preserved.

The body draws the attention of numerous groups with competing interests: archaeologists desperate to study the bog, those who want to profit from the land''s resources, a group of neo-pagans who demand the body be returned to its resting place. And underfoot, all along, there''s the land itself: a teeming colony of moss, with its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes becomes tangled in controversies stirred by her own discovery, she must face the deep history of what she has unearthed. Equally alive to post-Brexit England and Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen connects across time two young women learning to harness their strange strengths, in a landscape more mysterious than either can imagine.