Sally Magnusson on The Shapeshifter's Daughter

Sally Magnusson on The Shapeshifter's Daughter

It is always a pleasure to welcome Sally Magnusson to St Andrews. Join her for her latest foray into fiction -- a powerful retelling of the Norse myth of Hel set in Orkney.

Before she was a hideous monster, the queen of the underworld was simply Hel. But cast as a girl out of lofty Asgard, realm of the gods, by Odin the Allfather, Hel's fate as the terrible goddess of death is sealed. Half beauty, half crone, she has reigned for aeons in the starless darkness of Niflheim, grimly welcoming the most pitiful of death's travellers to her ice-locked prison. Until one day a memory shifts, and she is forced to seek out the sun in Midgard, where humans have made their home.

Faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Helen Firth makes the impulsive decision to return to Orkney after forty years to make peace with her past. Under the wintering solstice sun, she reconnects with the ungainly but affable Thorfinn Coffin, who helps her address the real reason she has returned to the islands to die.

As Helen draws closer to death and ever closer to Thorfinn, Hel in turn is intrigued by Helen. She, too, has a past to confront and a lesson to learn: that perhaps who she thinks she is isn't who she is really meant to be.

A powerful reimagining of the Norse myth of Hel, The Shapeshifter's Daughter celebrates the joy of reclaiming our stories.

Bestselling author, journalist and broadcaster Sally Magnusson has written several books for adults and children, most recently her Sunday Times bestseller Where Memories Go (2014) about her mother's dementia, The Sealwoman's Gift (2018), her acclaimed debut novel, The Ninth Child (2020) and Music in the Dark (2022). Sally lives outside Glasgow.