Bog Queen
by Anna North
GENRE: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
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.
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. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with climate 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.
Author Biography
Anna North is the author of the novels America Pacifica, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, and Outlawed, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick. She is also a senior correspondent at Vox. Her most recent novel, Bog Queen, was a national bestseller and a 2026 Science + Literature selected title. - National Book Foundation
Reviews
Booklist
North’s latest, following Outlawed (2021), is a remarkably crafted tale that asks important questions about the imprint we leave on our loved ones, our culture, and our land. Agnes is an American forensic anthropologist working to identify a body found buried in the moss of an English bog. Early assumptions are that it belongs to a 1960s murder victim, and that the woman’s niece wants answers about her mysterious death. But the immaculately preserved body is, in fact, much older by about two millennia. North manages to write captivatingly detailed explanations of body-preservation-by-moss and to craft singular characters. We not only learn about the introverted Agnes, but her narrative alternates with that of an unnamed woman from pre-Christian England. Like Agnes, she is driven by her calling. A druid whose healing and mystical knowledge was passed down by her mother, she travels to a distant village at a time when the Roman Empire threatens northern expansion. Both women are tenacious, but hampered by self-doubt. They must overcome uncertainty about friends and family to find a balance between change and preservation.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will be watching for the latest from this Reese's Book Club author. -- Annie Tully (Reviewed 9/1/2025) (Booklist, vol 122, number 1)
Publisher's Weekly
/* Starred Review */ 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. (Oct.) --Staff (Reviewed 08/04/2025) (Publishers Weekly, vol 272, issue 30, p)
Library Journal
Imerican forensic anthropologist Agnes investigates an unusual ancient body found in an English bog in the latest from bestselling North (Outlawed, a Reese's Book Club pick). With a 200K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2025 Library Journal --Melissa DeWild And Neal Wyatt (Reviewed 06/01/2025) (Library Journal, vol 150, issue 6, p3)
Kirkus Reviews
An American anthropologist in northern England becomes entangled in emotional and literal quagmires after identifying an ancient body in a bog. Agnes has a way with people—but only if they’re dead. A gifted student, she graduated from high school early and powered through university and doctoral studies to become a forensic anthropologist. Feeling oppressed by her doting father’s omnipresence and a too-comfortable boyfriend, Agnes decides to take a postdoc position in Manchester. She is called in to assist with the identification of what authorities believe is a murder victim killed by her husband in 1961 and buried in a peat bog, but Agnes immediately sees, and soon confirms, that this is a body older than any she (or, for that matter, almost anyone) has ever unearthed. In the novel’s first narrative track, Agnes attempts to conduct an excavation at the bog, caught in a web of conflicting interests that includes the peat company, the press, the niece of the still-undiscovered murder victim, a bioarchaeologist and her precocious teen daughter, and a group of environmental activists intent on rewilding the peat. The book’s second narrative belongs to “the druid of Bereda,” a Celtic priest from ancient Europe who navigates her diplomatic and spiritual duties during the fraught beginnings of the Roman Empire’s expansion. (The moss narrates briefly, too.) North’s previous novel,Outlawed (2021), turned the Western genre on its head, and here she tackles historical fiction, swinging for the fences by taking on an ancient culture (and one that largely lacks written records). Perhaps it’s inevitable that the character of Agnes cannot help but be less magnetic than the regal druid. Nevertheless, this is a memorable tale of the unexpected linkages of history, land, and female power.North widens her range with this layered mystery-meets-ancient-history mashup. (Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2025)
The Bog Wife
by Kay Chronister
Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a "bog-wife." Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails--or refuses--to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.
Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.
Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
by Annie Proulx
A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit.
In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever.
Circle of Days
by Ken Follett
A flint miner with a gift
Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Fair, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family live in prosperity and offer Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers, within their herder community.
A priestess who believes the impossible
Joia, Neen’s sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain.
A monument that will define a civilization
Joia’s vision of a great stone circle, assembled by the divided tribes of the Plain, will inspire Seft and become their life’s work. But as drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers and woodlanders – and an act of savage violence leads to open warfare…