Dark Earth – The new Costa Award-winning literary historical fiction novel (Paperback)

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In early Britain, where power is inherited and the forge is forbidden ground for women, Isla carries a dangerous skill. Taught in secret by her father, she can shape steel as well as any man. Her sister Blue keeps a different vigil, returning at low tide to the bones of the mud woman, executed for speaking too freely and left as a warning to others.

When Isla’s secret is uncovered, the sisters are forced to flee their coastal home. Their escape takes them across the water to Londinium, a half abandoned city haunted by its Roman past. Among squatters, travellers, and the dispossessed, they find fragile shelter in a hidden community led by the enigmatic Crowther. Safety, however, proves temporary.

Dark Earth is a richly imagined novel of exile and survival, rooted in landscape and myth. It explores sisterhood, resistance, and the search for belonging in a world built on violence and exclusion, where women must carve their own forms of kinship from the margins of history.