In this darkest of fairy tales, a young woman sets off to pick berries in the depths of the forest, but can't find her way home again. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman who offers her help. Then everything changes.

On a journey that will take her to the depths of the witch-haunted woods, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

'A dark treat of a novel: lush, exciting and gorgeously strange' - Sarah Waters