The Bloody Branch
- Harvill Secker (World English)
Man is cruel, but the flowers will have their revenge.
An orphan, a bride, and a sorceress, three women mistreated by men, join forces to make their own stories sing, their bodies fierce, and their land’s history tremble.
When an awkward young magician is rejected by his more accomplished sister, he declares war upon her whole sex – and even Mother Earth herself – in a campaign of dark magic, sexual violence and humiliation. But as he grows in shapeshifting power, so do his adversaries: Goewin the enslaved footholder, the flower-woman Blodeuwedd, and Arianrhod the sorceress. Filling out the feminist, ecological spirit of these ancient Celtic myths for the first time, The Bloody Branch leads the weird spirits of prehistory through the flower-spangled forest of mediaeval romance – and lets them loose upon the fears and obsessions of the present.
The Bloody Branch has boars who gore and more, hounds made to deceive, a hunt for ghosts, a public miracle birth, a royal curse for the ages, the nursing of foals, a bright ring of floral sex and a woman made of flowers, all cracking against the flagstones of castles and whirling on the slopes of densely wooded hills, in a tale crimson with violence, urgent with peril, shining with light, pulsing with magic.
Like John Cowper Powys, JRR Tolkien and Alan Garner before her, Brigid Lowe finds in the oldest prose stories in British Literature, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a fountain of mystery and meaning, and reanimates one branch here with bewitching energy, dexterity and resonance. Literature licks and nuzzles, and a new old story springs into life.