Bog Queen by Anna North
Anna North has written a tale with mysteries from a body found in the bog, believed to be 2,000 years old, and today’s struggle for the environment and development. Agnes is a young American forensic anthropologist who is hired to help identify a body believed to be buried in the bog from 196,1 and instead dates the remains as from the Druidic order of Celtic Europe, over 2,000 years old but preserved in the bog. Readers meet the young Druid as her mother has declared her, as she travels to Camulodunon and returns with gifts. She dies at a Solstice celebration and is buried in the bog. Readers will also know much of the life of Agnes as she spars with environmentalists and developers as she tries to save the bog. The mystery of the distant past and today’s conflict will haunt all who open these pages.
Bog Queen by Anna North, (List Price: $28.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781635579666, October 2025)
Reviewed by Nancy Pierce, Bookmiser in Marietta, Georgia
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I first saw a bog body in the British Museum, and I just thought, How amazing. This is a real person who lived and breathed 1000s of years ago, and I can still see him, and we can learn so much about him and his life, from his body and from studying him. And his people buried him in this place where I think they knew that he would be preserved, and I can imagine them, you know, hoping that maybe we would understand them. One day, I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it’s still breathtaking to see, and there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs, and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the non human world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the earth, but there are many other organisms here that have huge impact on us, in our lives, and I really wanted to share that too. 
What I really enjoy about writing love stories is the little moments that feel just as important as the big love declarations. I think it’s the acts of service, the little thoughtful things that each character will do for the other. In each of my books, there’s a moment that I can narrow down to, of consideration and thoughtfulness in a physical, tangible way. The way that Bo [Out on a Limb] goes about splitting their expenses. It’s not a grand declaration of love, but it’s respect, and it’s an understanding and communication, and it’s showing somebody who is really capable of having awkward conversations when wanting to take care of somebody. And wanting to look after someone with respect in mind. Or like Caleb in Out of the Woods, when Sarah is upset because they’re going camping and they don’t have any electricity. She doesn’t bring her Kindle, but he brings it, and he buys her a solar charger. It’s this little way of like letting someone know that they’re seen and their past influences matter
They were such extraordinarily different people in the way they related to the world and other people. He was this awkward and lonely man before he met her, living quite a dislocated life, and she was this livewire and such a compelling, energetic, positive presence. [There’s] something about how a marriage like that works, then putting that marriage in this extreme scenario, to the ultimate test.
I wanted to write a controlled, intense, strange, sensual, truthful novel set firmly in a genre I’m increasingly thinking of as wonder. You can watch a romcom where someone is covered with bees and they’re terrified, and you’re laughing, so their experience is not the same as your experience. Likewise, you can be watching a horror film, and they think they’re having a normal Monday, and you know better. That’s where the horror happens.
