MITHIM

'I did not have to atone for not being a good daughter, sister, girlfriend. The realisation is a freedom for me.

Wexford, 1657. Eight years after Cromwell's soldiers burned Killenea Castle and scattered her world, Mithim McMurrough is living alone in the depths of the forest. A healer and herbalist, daughter of a Gaelic lord and last keeper of her mother's knowledge from the Beara Peninsula, she has made the land her sanctuary. The soldiers are moving closer. The past is closing in faster still.

As the year turns through the Celtic tree calendar and the days draw in, one presence grows stronger than all the rest: An Cailleach Bhéarra, the Hag of Beara, oldest of the old gods, who shaped the mountains and rules the land from Samhain to spring. She is the wind through the trees, 'the sweep of her cloak.' She is the warning Mithim ignores when a handsome stranger comes too close. She is the saffron altar cloth laid out on the morning of the winter solstice - which, in Cromwell's Ireland, could get a woman burned as a witch. And in the depths of the year Mithim sees it plainly: 'I had become her' - a woman alone in the weather, as the goddess is a rock alone at the edge of the Atlantic.

Rooted in Irish myth, Gaelic healing lore and the real places of Wexford and West Cork, Mithim is about what is left when an army has burned everything that can be burned - the knowledge nobody could take, and the women who kept it.

For readers who love Irish mythology and nature-writing, and for anyone looking for something rooted, atmospheric, and genuinely distinct from the Celtic fantasy shelf.