This month, the past and present collide in murder investigations in modern-day England and Puerto Rico.
Bog Queen: A Novel
Anna North (Bloomsbury Publishing, 288 pp., $28.99, October 2025)
Bog Queen, Anna North’s fourth novel, is many things: an intricate work of historical fiction, a tightly woven mystery reminiscent of the police procedural Bones, and perhaps most of all, a transfixing excavation of the competing interests converging on the natural world in our present moment of ecological devastation, economic precarity, and historical forgetting.
North’s novel is set between two periods: England in 2018, where Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is working in the market town of Ludlow to uncover what happened to a 2,000-year-old corpse recently unearthed from a peat bog; and ancient Britain, where a young druid from the town journeys to Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), the capital of Roman Britain, and back.
The chapters alternate between the two women’s stories, which each capture a pivotal moment in the town’s history. The former takes place during “a critical time for the moss” that makes up the bogland, as one environmental activist puts it; after years of being harvested for peat, it’s about to be turned into a housing development. The latter witnesses the transformation of Celtic society amid the expansion of the Roman Empire.
North’s prose reveals a genuine care for her characters—all fully rendered individuals who are forced to confront their blind spots, even as they are devoted to their own causes. Agnes is mesmerized by the bog body, that “rare transfigured human being whom it is [her] privilege to know,” which has an “alchemical quality … a human being turned to brightness beneath the earth.”
Yet Agnes is also aware of “the work she stands athwart in order to do her own.” When she looks upon the bog—its layers of peat stripped raw—she “has a feeling of vicarious pain, like looking at a burn or laceration in living flesh.” As activists try to convince her to leave the dig behind, so that they can rewild the bog, she reflects on the climate crisis: “She has read the IPCC report, she knows the scale of what is possible … And yet it has all been too large for her mind to hold, her attention cannot find a place to rest, it slides back into what she knows well, a broken tooth, the delicate precious goblet of a skull.”
As Bog Queen comes to its satisfying end, it’s clear that, as in the best of stories, there are no easy answers. Not even the developers or the peat company, the town’s largest employer, come across as villainous. This expansive tale is about much more than a battle among scientists, environmentalists, and corporate interests. In confronting questions of duty, ambition, and community, North’s magical novel renders the world—both ancient and modern—mysterious to us again.—Chloe Hadavas
This Is the Only Kingdom: A Novel
Jaquira Díaz (Algonquin Books, 336 pp., $28, October 2025)
Toward the end of This Is the Only Kingdom, Jaquira Díaz’s debut novel, one of her protagonists finally puts the book’s title into context: “[H]ell wasn’t real, and heaven was no kingdom,” she thinks, “this is the only kingdom.” It is the 1990s in Puerto Rico, and a Black gay man has just been killed and denied a Catholic funeral.
The kingdom known to Díaz’s characters is the projects of Humacao, Puerto Rico. Her multigenerational novel is set in el Caserío Padre Rivera, a place “people left … in a police car or a body bag or a celebration, their story all over the local papers.” The community confronts racism, homophobia, poverty, and U.S. imperialism. In the process, they turn against each other.
The novel begins in 1975. Maricarmen and her sister, Loli, are among the few white children in el Caserío, a mostly Black community. Their mother, Blanca, kicks Maricarmen out when she starts dating a Black boy named Rey. The “wannabe Caserío Robin Hood,” Rey has been in and out of juvenile detention but always looks out for his neighbors and enchants them with his musical talent.
Maricarmen becomes pregnant with a daughter whom she names Nena, and Rey returns to his criminal ways and goes on the run from the police. His family must deal with the harrowing consequences of his actions. Maricarmen, by now a high school dropout, also becomes the caregiver for Rey’s much younger brother, Tito.
A decade and a half later, Tito and Nena—who are like siblings—live in the shadows of Maricarmen’s and Rey’s choices. Both struggle to come to terms with their identities in a hostile environment. “Tito was soft, and she loved him for it,” Díaz writes of Nena. “But it was the kind of soft the world would not accept, because the world was hard.”
A tragedy rocks el Caserío, underscoring this hardness and upending Maricarmen’s and Nena’s lives. They move to Miami, where Blanca and Loli had relocated years earlier. In addition to patching up familial wounds, Nena must navigate a U.S. high school where her peers taunt her for being gay and pelt her with ignorant comments: “I didn’t know they had Black people in Puerto Rico.”
The U.S. colonial presence in Puerto Rico is a subtle throughline in This Is the Only Kingdom. The residents of el Caserío ended up there because “the American government didn’t recognize” their land titles. Maricarmen works on a pharmaceutical assembly line in Humacao, where “American factories … covered the air with black smoke, dumping their toxic waste outside of the poorest neighborhoods.”
If Nena and her peers learn one lesson in the course of the novel, it is that they don’t matter to the United States. “The second they find out you’re from el Caserío, those gringos want nothing to do with you,” Díaz writes.—Allison Meakem
October Releases, in Brief
Postmodern giant Thomas Pynchon returns with Shadow Ticket, a noir that moves from 1930s Wisconsin to a ship filled with shadowy figures from interwar Europe. In Hungarian author Krisztina Toth’s dystopian Eye of the Monkey, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, a doctor-patient love affair isn’t quite what it seems. Gish Jen crafts a mother-daughter tale for the ages in Bad Bad Girl, set between midcentury Shanghai and New York. Booker Prize-winning Georgi Gospodinov’s meditation on grief and fatherhood, Death and the Gardener, is translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. In Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief, a near-future Kolkata faces famine and climate extremes.
Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse embarks on a new trilogy with Vaim, translated by Damion Searls. Pulitzer Prize-winning Adam Johnson weds myth, Polynesian oral history, and research into the Tuʻi Tonga Empire in The Wayfinder. Catalina Infante Beovic’s debut novel The Cracks We Bear, translated by Michelle Mirabella, revisits post-Pinochet-era Chile. In Sonora Jha’s satirical Intemperance, a divorcée in a U.S. town holds a contest for her hand based on an ancient Indian ritual. And Mattia Filice transposes his real-life experience of running high-speed trains into fiction in Driver, translated from the French by Jacques Houis.—CH
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