Book Review of the Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson

 

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An absorbing novel about Viking myths in an ancient landscape.

  

The landscape is that of Orkney and it’s inextricably bound with the surrounding seascape and a past so distant that Viking myth turns out to qualify as modern re-invention.

A Surrey librarian in her late fifties learns that she has terminal cancer and decides that, rather than struggling hard to stay alive, she will die on her own terms after answering some questions about her childhood, in Orkney. “Helen” sells up everything connected with the English life she built for herself after being “exiled” at age fifteen, rents a flat near where she grew up (mostly in the library when things were bad at home) and goes there with the idea that when the times comes, she will freeze herself to death on a hillside rather than submit to what she sees as the pointless torture of end of life care. The only person she actually recognises is “Thorfinn,” who worked as a book-stacker in the library in his teens and once asked her out, unsuccessfully initially but forty-two years have passed and he still has hope.

At some other time and place, which somehow connects to Orkney in the present day, “Hel’” a half-beautiful, half hideous “monster” is betrayed by the Norse gods and exiled to the underworld, to take charge of departed souls who aren‘t going to Valhalla (almost everyone who dies, in practice).

Importantly, the historical site where Hel’ meets and collects souls is a neolithic burial mound which predates Viking culture by several times as many years as Viking culture predates ours.

The Norse gods mostly fear Hel’, but for the wrong reasons. Hel’ and Helen have things to learn from each other and that will be transformative.

And Helen finds that she can tolerate Thorfinn helping her, though it takes her rather longer to accept that he loves her and she actually wants him to love her. Hel’ learns to rediscover her role in really ancient neolithic myth: she is not the cruel and repulsive monster the Norse gods make her out to be.

This is a lovely story about finding peace as well as love, even in one’s last days. After the din and clamour, the sheer orchestrated panic, of the covid years, this is the sort of peace and love denied to so many. Thousands died with no-one allowed to hold their hand or say a soothing word. This is what they should have had.

This book doesn’t so much fill a gap in the market as a gaping hole in modern society’s soul.

The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson is published on the 6^th of November 2025 by John Murray Press.