How Death Came into the World

From Eve and Pandora, Marzanna and the Morrigan, traditional accounts of how Death came into the world usually put the blame on women. In How Death Came into the World, Nancy Charley offers some startlingly alternative explanations. Exploring those dark forests of myth where every tale is ‘an acorn of truth’, she retells some old stories and conjures up some new ones to make sense of the relationship between painful death and bloody birth. How Death Came into the World is a collection of weird and wise fireside tales about grandmothers, mothers and daughters, the unshawled, the unheard and the undead. It’s a book of burrows and burials, murmurs and murmurations, of lost coins and lost children, the dreams of fish, the ravenous grief of bears and the matted fur beneath the skin.