Bog Queen: a novel

Bog Queen: a novel

By: Anna North

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025. 264 pages. Fiction

When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. Agnes has always been more comfortable with the dead than the living, 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. The mystery of the Iron Age body draws the attention of numerous groups with competing interests : the archaeologists who want to study the surrounding bog, the peat-cutters who want to profit from the land's resources, and a group of environmental activists and neo-pagans who demand the body be returned to its resting place and that the moss-layered bog -- a marvel of carbon capture on a warming planet -- 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 is drawn into the controversy stirred by the body and its habitat, she must face not only the deep history of what she has unearthed, but also the relationships she has forsworn in her bid for independence.

From the first page, I was hooked. North has a lyrical way of describing Agnes and the way she looks at people - both the living and the dead. I was fascinated by how she could read people's trauma, pain or fear by the way they walked or stood. The novel is told from several viewpoints: the moss, Agnes, and the Bog Queen herself (a woman from the Iron Age), and they all weave together magically. I feel as though the author was heavily influenced by the "Lindow Man", a well-preserved bog body discovered in the Lindow Moss in 1983 ('The Life and Death of a Druid Prince' is a very readable nonfiction book about the study of his body and what they suppose his life was like). The historical details, archaeology and the emotional journey that Agnes experiences are all fascinating elements to the story. I would highly recommend this unique novel. 

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Ancestors, a prehistory of Britain in seven burials

By: Alice Roberts

Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2021. 431 pages. Nonfiction.

'Most of what we know about our Anglo-Saxon ancestors comes from their graves, ' said Tony Robinson in the opening to a 2001 Time Team episode about the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. He wasn't wrong. But this isn't only true of the Anglo-Saxons. Graves provide us with an extraordinarily detailed picture of the past. We may be looking at someone long dead, but we learn as much about life in the past, as we do about death, from these remains. Now, in her superb new book Ancestors, Alice Roberts investigates seven British graves to discover all that we can learn about our forebears, dating back to Neanderthal times some 220,000 years ago in North Wales right up to the Iron Age burial site in Pocklington, Yorkshire, dating back about 2500 years. The seven burials in this book stand out because they are so rich in detail, so emblematic of a particular time and place, or because they tell us unexpected things about our ancestors.

The Last Neanderthal

By: Claire Cameron

Little Brown and Company, 2017. 277 pages. Fiction

40,000 years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself. In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women's lives. Haunting, suspenseful, and profoundly moving, THE LAST NEANDERTHAL asks us to reconsider all we think we know about what it means to be human.

The Crossing Places

By: Elly Griffiths

Mariner Books, 2010. 303 pages. Mystery

When a child's bones are found near an ancient henge in the wild saltmarshes of Norfolk's north coast, Ruth Galloway, a university lecturer in forensic archaeology, is asked to date them by DCI Harry Nelson who thinks they may be the bones of a child called Lucy who has been missing for ten years.

MGB