From V. E. Schwab, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger.

This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.

This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.

This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.

This is a story about life—
how it ends, and how it starts.

This is a gorgeous book with succulent prose and enticing characters. As with The invisible life of Addie LaRue, Schwab expertly teases the reader with questions about what a lifespan of centuries can do to a soul and to a love, while delivering a fantasy that is at once historical and contemporary, urban and pastoral.

Her three protagonists are both nicely distinct and utterly compelling.

There is Spanish Maria, born into a country just freshly assembled from its constituent parts by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle of Castile. A young woman of ambitions for whom a social climbing marriage swiftly becomes a prison.

Maria stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”

Air hissed through her mother’s teeth. “I know you daughter, I know you have always wanted more. And you have chosen a grand life. But it will not be an easy one. Men like the viscount, they take what they want.”

So do I, thought Maria as the comb hissed through her hair like water on hot coals.

There is Scottish Alice, overseas student at Harvard in the last few months before Covid would hit, struggling to fit in.

When Alice wakes the day after the party, her first and only thought is this.

The world is far too fucking bright.

But also haunted by memories

The difference between missing and memory.

Because Catty remembers their mum.

And Alice doesn’t.

It’s not her fault-she was only five when Sarah Moore died, and the few memories she has are mostly smudges, like old dreams.

And there is English Charlotte, navigating the ballrooms of Regency London with more reservations about her predicament than any Austen heroine.

Still, as her father said, she is a quick study, and by the end of the month, Charlotte has become a decent mimic of the girl she’s meant to be. But it is only ever that, a posture, a charade. Playing dress-up for a life she does not want.

But offered an intoxicating opportunity

It’s not the closest they have ever been – there were moments when Sabine was teaching her to dance, their bodies tangled briefly – but Charlotte startles at the nearness, the sliver of space between their bodies, Sabine’s like a shadow, close but not yet touching hers.

And perhaps it’s the sherry or the talk of freedom, of chance that is making her so hot, or perhaps it is knowing how easy it would be to close the narrow gap as Charlotte had done in the garden, certain if she did that Sabine would not pull back in shame.

Despite the centuries that separate them, Schwab braids the stories of these three remarkable and different women together in an intoxicating tale of love, intrigue, betrayal and revenge.

SPOILER POINT – If, like me, you come to Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil without having read any of the blurb or publicity material – then you can stop reading this review here and enjoy the surprise reveal of the major plot point about the nature of the protagonists that I found on page 110.

But if you know, or have guessed already, or don’t mind being unsurprised by page 110, then scroll down and read on!

This book is about vampires, vampires and their victims, and their lovers and how these three groups of people shift and intermingle.

Schwab brings fresh invention to a familiar trope, with motifs that spice, surprise and subvert the reader’s expectations of vampiric lifestyles – and deathstyles! The nature of her vampires is revealed through the lens of the long-lived Sabine in a strand that echoes Interview with a Vampire, but from a very female point of view. In her five centuries of existence Sabine meets others of her own kind and learns of their weaknesses by education and experience: Sunlight is shockingly uncomfortable, like a continuous migraine, but it is not fatal; Grave dirt is a crippling poison; The thirst for blood is a literally insatiable hunger that makes drinking it in as futile as ‘filling a colander’. While Schwab’s vampires may not age, they do change, rotting from within as their lifestyle saps each small vestige of humanity. Some, like Pratchett’s vampiric photographer – Otto von Chriek, have found a way to exist more humanely within the human world. Others though, refuse to partake of blood that has been ‘decanted’. These variations on the vampire theme add fresh texture and depth to a story that is about obsessive love and the erosion of humanity.

That destructive aspect of the infatuations between the characters make this unlikely to fit the Romantasy brief. It is too hard to see where a happy ending might come from or even what it would look like for any of our differently delightful protagonists.

Each of the women has their own back story.

Alice’s relationship with her sister and her stepmother is teased out over several sections to reveal how a wee girl from rural Scotland fled to throw herself unenthusiastically into Boston’s academic hubbub.

Charlotte’s sapphic inclinations are an unmentionable shock to her close family in an era where merely speaking to someone before you’d been introduced to them was a mortifying scandal. A hope that such urges can be scourged through matchmaking on the debutante circuit precipitates a hurried dismissal to the care of a fearsome aunt-

Amelia Hastings, a terrifying breed of high society, at once round and sharp, pale hair pinned up in an elegant bun, and shrewd blue eyes that land squarely on Charlotte. Eyes that could unpick her stitch by stitch.

Maria’s heir-obsessed husband and awful in-laws are sufficiently dreadful to make the reader sympathise with the victim of a marriage she herself sought out, but once the family is gone the cold narcissism of Maria’s ambition is laid bare.

Schwab interweaves these tangled timelines with elegant, velvet turns of phrase that sooth the reader and smooth the narrative, such that even a description of nothing happening is a delight to read.

The prose catches the bewitching effect of a curve, the lure of a fine neck, the intoxication of a heartbeat, in passages of wonderfully subtle sensuality that makes for a joyful read even in its darkest moments.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is due for release 10th June – you can pre-order your copy HERE