Cursed Daughters, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday). Set in Lagos, this moody, engrossing novel braids together the stories of three women reared to believe that they are cursed because of a shared ancestor’s adultery. The novel opens with the suicide, by drowning, of one of the women, whose death is cast as the “inevitable consequence” of her forebear’s actions. Shortly after that woman’s funeral, her cousin gives birth to a daughter, who bears such a striking resemblance to the deceased that some in the family take her to be a reincarnation. As Braithwaite follows the protagonists’ attempts to avoid the fate of the generations of women who preceded them, she explores the possibility of personal freedom in a society that is still bound by tradition, prejudice, and superstition.
Bog Queen, by Anna North (Bloomsbury). In this ecologically inflected novel, Agnes, a forensic anthropologist, is asked to identify the body of a woman found in an English peat bog. Remarkably preserved, the body turns out to be more than two thousand years old. As Agnes tries to learn more about the woman’s death, she encounters obstacles from a company intent on peat extraction and a group of environmentalists occupying the site in protest. The novel alternates between Agnes’s life and that of the woman, a Celtic druid weighing an alliance with a Roman settlement; additional interludes are voiced by the moss that connects them. Agnes’s investigation sparks a new attention to the world around her, and the novel’s sensibility mirrors the peat organisms themselves, which, a character explains, are “interconnected not just across space, but across time.”
