The Bloody Branch

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.
 

'Brigid’s book is a masterpiece of poetic reimagining, woven into an intricate, otherworldly, complex and dramatic novel that held me spellbound.' 

Barbara Erskine, author of The Story Spinner and Lady of Hay

‘A rich, visceral fever dream unafraid to take you to the darkest corners of myth and magic. Women's bodies are at the heart of this book: the ways in which they are sacrificed to men and motherhood, and the struggle faced in reclaiming them. At times challenging, but always powerful, the story is conveyed in language that branches, metamorphoses, and invites you to follow it into the mists of medieval myth. Lowe deftly peels back the layers of this archetypal landscape, which modern readers will find both familiar and deeply strange.’

Lucy Holland, author of Sistersong