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.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK MAJOR TV ADAPTATION IN DEVELOPMENT BY AMY ADAMS 'Calling it The Handmaid's Tale crossed with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid goes some way to describe this novel's memorable world, but it is also wholly its own' KIRKUS '2021 is already a year that could use a little joy. Here to provide some is Outlawed . . . It's an absolute romp and contains basically everything I want in a book: witchy nuns, heists, a marriage of convenience, and a midwife trying to build a bomb out of horse dung' Vox 'Outlawed sets a high bar for the 12 months of publishing still to come . . . It upends the tropes of the traditionally macho and heteronormative genre while also being a rip-snortin' good read, too' THE WEEK (Most Anticipated Books of the Year) 'North is a riveting storyteller . . . Reader, you are in for a real treat' JENNY ZHANG 'Fans of Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy finally get the Western they deserve' ALEXIS COE 'A thrilling tale eerily familiar but utterly transformed ... In North's galloping prose, it's a fantastically cinematic adventure that turns the sexual politics of the Old West inside out' WASHINGTON POST 'A western unlike any other, Outlawed features queer cowgirls, gender nonconforming robbers and a band of feminists that fight against the grain for autonomy, agency and the power to define their own worth' MS. 'A grand, unforgettable tale' ESME WEIJUN WANG In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. On the day of her wedding-dance, Ada feels lucky. She loves her broad-shouldered, bashful husband and her job as an apprentice midwife. But her luck will not last. It is every woman's duty to have a child, to replace those that were lost in the Great Flu. And after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are hanged as witches, Ada's survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang. Its leader, a charismatic preacher-turned-robber, known to all as The Kid, wants to create a safe haven for women outcast from society. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

'If The Girl on the Train was the woman of 2015, then Sophie Stark is this year's model. Anna North's novel, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, has been a hit in America, with Lena Dunham describing its protagonist as a "totally unforgettable female antihero". Out now - soon every girl on every train will be reading it' Sunday Times Who is the real Sophie Stark? The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is the story of an enigmatic film director, told by the six people who loved her most. Brilliant, infuriating, all-seeing and unknowable, Sophie Stark makes films said to be 'more like life than life itself'. But her genius comes at a terrible cost: to her husband, to the brother she left behind, and to an actress who knows too much. With shades of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, A Visit from the Goon Squad and Where'd You Go, Bernadette, it combines a uniquely appealing sensibility with a compulsively page-turning plot. 'Thriller-paced, with mysteries revealed at every turn. The great mystery at the centre is Sophie Stark, a totally unforgettable female anti-hero who conforms to absolutely none of our expectations and suffers deeply for it' Lena Dunham 'North is a natural, butter-smooth storyteller' Maggie Shipstead, author of SEATING ARRANGEMENTS 'I read THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SOPHIE STARK with my heart in my mouth. Not only a dissection of genius and the havoc it can wreak, but also a thunderously good story' Emma Donoghue, author of ROME 'Jennifer Egan, eat your heart out' Sam Baker 'A captivating portrait of the artist as a young woman. It's a story that examines the notion of artistic legacy and meditates on the ethics involved in film-making and storytelling' THE INDEPENDENT 'Gripping and graceful' THE GUARDIAN 'The year's must read' GLAMOUR