The next book to be featured this season on the Sara Cox Radio 2 Book Club is The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson—an electrifying reimagining of the Norse tale of Hel, queen of the underworld cruelly banished by the brutal Odin.
The book was released on 6 November and Sally’s interview with Sara is on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 18 November.
Read an exclusive extract.
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The Shapeshifter’s Daughter
Nothing, on earth or below it, freezes faster than the worthless heart.
Before she was a hideous monster, the queen of the underworld was simply Hel. But cast as a girl out of lofty Asgard, realm of the gods, by Odin the Allfather, Hel’s fate as the terrible goddess of death is sealed. Half beauty, half crone, she has reigned for aeons in the starless darkness of Niflheim, grimly welcoming the most pitiful of death’s travellers to her ice-locked prison. Until one day a memory shifts, and she is forced to seek out the sun in Midgard, where humans have made their home.
Faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Helen Firth makes the impulsive decision to return to Orkney after forty years to make peace with her past. Under the wintering solstice sun, she reconnects with the ungainly but affable Thorfinn Coffin, who helps her address the real reason she has returned to the islands to die.
As Helen draws closer to death and ever closer to Thorfinn, Hel in turn is intrigued by Helen. She, too, has a past to confront and a lesson to learn: that perhaps who she thinks she is isn’t who she is really meant to be.
About the author
Bestselling author, journalist and broadcaster Sally Magnusson has written several books for adults and children, most recently her Sunday Times bestseller Where Memories Go (2014) about her mother’s dementia, The Sealwoman’s Gift (2018), her acclaimed debut novel, The Ninth Child (2020) and Music in the Dark (2022). Sally lives outside Glasgow. She is available for interviews and events.
A word from Sally
“Oh, this is just fantastic – not just that The Shapeshifter’s Daughter has been chosen for the marvellous Radio 2 Book Club, but to realise that library staff and other reading groups are the ones who put it there. The very core of my novel is a library. The story reimagines one of the Norse myths, in which Hel, feared and despised queen of the underworld, tries to find out who she really is. Pursued by her father, Loki, she arrives in modern Orkney, where she connects with a woman, Helen Firth, who has returned there to die. Over one golden winter their two worlds unite. Stromness Library in Orkney is where Helen as a child immersed herself in stories about the Norse gods; now, in middle age, she finds love and a kind of healing there. Libraries are where so many of us have found refuge, solace and exhilaration in story and where increasingly today the whole community finds a focal point. As an author, I wanted a library at the very heart of this novel, and I will be SO thrilled if The Shapeshifter’s Daughter appeals to library readers across the country today.”
Get involved
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