Bog Queen

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.

Author Biography

Anna North is the author of three novels: Outlawed, America Pacifica, and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. Published in 2021, Outlawed was a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club and Belletrist pick. In addition to her fiction writing, she is also a senior correspondent at Vox, covering American work and family life. Previously, she was a writer and editor at the New York Times, Salon, BuzzFeed and Jezebel. Anna North grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2009, and now lives in Brooklyn.