For Adults
The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson is the next book to be featured this season on the Sara Cox Radio 2 Book Club—an electrifying reimagining of the Norse tale of Hel, queen of the underworld cruelly banished by the brutal Odin.
You can listen to the live interview with Sally on BBC Sounds from 18 November.
We have the chance for you to win a set of 10 copies of this novel for your book club. To apply, click on the survey link below. UK residents only, deadline for entries 3 December 2025.
Not yet a member of Book Club Hub? Sign up now.
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.
How to apply
To apply, fill in this survey by 3 December.
