Hemlock & Silver follows Anja, a healer who voluntarily takes poison to further her experiments in the search for cures. When the king knocks on her door to request her help in discovering who is poisoning his daughter, Princess Snow, Anja’s life is thrown into disarray and poison is now at the bottom of the list of things trying to kill her. This compelling retelling of Snow White twists every aspect on the fairy tale on its head and plunges the reader into an unsettling world of magic mirrors, bewildering mystery, and irritable roosters. 

T Kingfisher once again nails the entirely too-relatable older protagonist for anyone who’s sick of the wide-eyed teenaged chosen one. Anja is practical, irritable, empathetic, and almost always a little bit frazzled. Her professional dedication to finding cures for deadly poisons is the one thread that holds her sanity together through this bizarre adventure to a desert kingdom despite her regular and incredibly relatable urge to nap away her responsibilities. It turns out that hiding under a duvet will not, in fact, stop the monster under the bed. 

Kingfisher tends to write three different kinds of books: horror stories, fairy tale retellings, and romance novels. While they have proven time and time again that they are able to write brilliant versions of all, I can’t help but feel that the romantic storyline was unnecessary in this particular story. Javier, Anja’s bodyguard, is a practical, professional man who takes Anja’s chaotic nonsense in his stride in her quest to find the poisoner behind Princess Snow’s mysterious illness. His job role alone puts him in a deeply shippable position with Anja, but both of them would have ultimately reached the same conclusion to their character arcs if the relationship they had built had been purely platonic. It was hard to follow the logic behind the apparently budding attraction, and it was jarring enough that it distracted from the decidedly more entertaining mystery plotline.

When fairy tale retellings are as popular as they are it’s an impressive feat to find a unique take on such a classic but Kingfisher is natural at finding the unexpected entry points into the stories we all know and love and Hemlock & Silver is no exception. There were points where the story wrapped me so fully in the bizarre mystery and deliciously creepy magic system that I completely forgot we were supposed to be following the familiar elements of the original fairy tale. Kingfisher wielded them masterfully, injecting them into her world in unexpected ways and neatly tying the threads together at the end.

An unmissable book for horror and fairy tale fans alike. 

Hemlock & Silver will be released in the UK on 21st August 2025 – you can order your copy HERE