Three figures loom from the gathering dark of Britain’s oldest story: a queen risen from slavery, a sorceress of the moon, and flowers imprisoned in woman’s form. Their fates are bound together by the cruelty of a magician whose hungers scar the land. The Bloody Branch retells their story from the inside, revealing an epic not of men’s wars and conquests but of women’s pain and ecstasy, birth and transformation – flesh, flower and blood held in animation by the eerie power of the land. Women suffer alone, but fight back together. Brigid Lowe’s dark, sensuous and unsettling debut casts ancient light on desire, sex and our relationship with nature, as these original heroines blossom into fierce new life.
