The Red Mouth

by Sheila Armstrong

From a rising star in literary fiction comes a story of two discoveries made deep in an Irish bogland, threading together four lives across time.

When a dog finds a strange, alien antler in a restored bog, the owner's first thought is to keep it for himself. But when he realises the value of his find, he is drawn back to the rich peat to keep searching. It is not one stag skeleton that is buried there, but dozens – an ancient dying ground of the Great Irish Elk.

Other things have surfaced from the prehistoric settlements, bronze cauldrons, ancient butter, iron weapons – and the mutilated body of a two-thousand-year-old female. Fifty years ago, a young archaeologist named her Belroe Woman, and dedicated his life to telling the story of her sacrificial death.

While state and public treat the bog body as a national treasure, others must reckon with its otherworldly influence over their the peat-cutter who first unearthed her and carries this discovery like a curse; the archaeologist's daughter who grows up in the shadow of the bog's strange magnetism; and the young environmental scientist whose work draws her back to where it all began.

From antler to bog body, The Red Mouth – an béal rua – is a haunting, lyrical exploration of how shifting histories can reshape landscape, language and legacies. The deep time of the bog is both mystical and sinister, the iron-fed streams running through its soil staining everything they touch. Those bound to it must decide what to bury – and what to unearth.

PRAISE FOR SHEILA
'Unsettling, unpredictable, and brilliant' Roddy Doyle
'Vivid, sensuous ... A subtle tale of loss, loneliness and disconnection' Paul Lynch
'Lush, lyrical and cleverly constructed. A beautiful book' Louise Kennedy
'Beautifully written ... An unchained sea melody' Anne Enright
'Writes complex and troubling stories with such unflinching graciousness' Jan Carson

237 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication July 2, 2026

About the author

Sheila Armstrong is a writer from the north-west of Ireland. She is the author of How To Gut A Fish, a collection of short stories, and two novels, Falling Animals and The Red Mouth. Her work has been translated into over ten languages and nominated for the Irish Book Awards, the Society of Authors Awards, the Kate O’Brien Award, the Edge Hill Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

She thinks of the bog-woman, the bog-boy, of mothers, sisters, fathers; of knowledge and of forgiveness. If time were turned on its axis, she could hop from promontory to promontory, along the fractal outline of a coast; from a single point, she could watch the incoming wave of the future, skirt around the past to inspect it from behind. But this is now, all pasts converge, all futures diverge. She stands on the breathy rustle of an infinite, mossy sea. And, just visible in the hazy distance: an island. just visible in the hazy distance: an island.

 
Sheila Armstrong’s debut novel “Falling Animals” (which received a podium place in the 2025 EU Prize for Literature) was inspired by a real life story of an unintentified man found dead on a Sligo beach in 2009, and used her short story skills across a series of short third party point of view chapters capturing a range of globally based and interconnected lives.
 
This her second novel – I would think an excellent candidate for the Society of Author’s Encore Award as well as an outsider for the Booker and Women’s Prizes – was recommended to me by Roisin O’Donnell (author of the brilliant “Nesting”). 
 
And interestingly it starts (and is effectively based around) two discoveries – this time in a partly restored Irish peat bog -  the first a giant and ancient antler, but the second a body – but this time a two thousand year old one of a female believed to be the victim of some form of ritual sacrifice and named by the archaeologist that discovers her (and builds much of his subsequent career around filling in her story) as Belroe Woman (after “Belroe, an béal rua, the place of the red mouth, for the mountain streams that enter the lowlands crystal clear and leave russet dark”).
 
It effectively has four point of view characters: Patch (and his memorable lurcher dog) – who finds the antler and takes it home, eventually getting in trouble with the authorities; Tomás, a peat digger – who first discovers the body and who also points the archaeologists towards an ancient cave which seems some form of burial chamber; Maeve - who works as an environmental surveyor, and is involved alongside a new archaeological survey which investigates what turns out to be a mass find of ancient Elk antlers; Brigit – the oldest daughter of the archaeologist.  All have complex and conflicted, almost melancholic backstories and current lives which are woven into their stories.
 
The novel has for me a very distinctive way of dealing with time. 
 

Time descends in layers of poured honey. Maps begin as isolated points of light and stone and clusters of hot breath, separated by black, empty space. Centuries roll by, decades retreat, as fast as a lover’s heartbeat

 
The twelve chapters (cycling through the main point of view characters) are named and largely set in successive months (starting in March through to February) and (particularly in their opening paragraphs) draw heavily on the Celtic calendar and ancient Wheel of the Year.  Further the narrative has an overall natural chronological storyline including in the end the different strands converging – and yet in some cases roam over years – often skipping over decades both back to historical events (and particularly the two key discoveries) and forward to family milestones. 
 
The effect is to blur present, past and future into more of a timeless and seamless tale – an effect which I think is entirely intrinsic to the very conception of the novel.
 
As an aside the novel felt like it was in conversation with two other literary fiction novels released this year – Katya Balen’s “Our Numbered Bodies” which also features archaeologists and an ancient body found in a bog (albeit in England) and (as was pointed out to me by Roisin when she recommended the novel) with Maggie O’Farrell’s “Land” with its exploration of the hidden depths of history in the Irish soil but with I think much more awareness than (the in my view slightly naive) “Land” of the dangers of mythologising history and the concept of the original people/first inhabitants. I was fascinated by an interview in the Irish Times where Armstrong says “I'm travelling a lot for work at the minute and I've become aware of how Irishness is considered abroad, and how much that can be weaponised. It's implied that being white Irish is something worth preserving and needs to be protected from all these terrible foreigners."
 
Overall a beautifully written novel.
 
My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley
 

And then the ranger knocks off the last light in the centre and they are blinded, or the opposite of blinded: what comes before sight, that thick darkness of pre-creation. She reaches for Jorge’s invisible arm and they stand still and look up, and as their eyes adapt, they spiral through billions of years of creation: the aeons of nothingness, the molecular cooling and hardening, the spiralling clouds of dust; the percussive crack of one planet into another; the long simmer to life, the spread of green seas and blue. The first tail-dragging footprints on a bed of flat rock, the shedding of scales and growth of fur; the stand to stretch towards the warm beating of a heart, the warm beating of many hearts, of a million, billion hearts. The gentle defiance of death and the prayers in small, dark places; the laying-down of deer and the slitting of throats. That old, cold blood quickens in the soil and breaks through the soles of their boots and into their feet, reddens and warms again, races up through their legs and organs and chest, up each vertebra, fizzling through their brains and meeting their corneas – the final refraction – and off again up into the dazzling, milkspilled night.

[Laura King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great now I'm scared of bogs too

[Stephen the Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story about two discoveries made in an Irish Peat Bog- antlers from an ancient Elk and the body of a young woman brutally killed two millennia ago - known as the Belroe Woman. It is the location of the bog and its hidden secrets that the key context for this haunting and poetic novel.

Over a period it follows four characters whose lives are impacted upon by the peat bog and the discoveries and the book progresses their stories begin to intertwine and connect building up the impact of the world associated to the Bog.

The man who discovered the antler reflects upon his life and his need to unearth this mysterious form; the person whilst cutting peat discovers the woman's body finds her existence permeates within and haunts; the daughter of the archaeologist who works on the body finds her life overshadowed by the ancient corpse and a young scientist feels herself drawn back to her roots.

There is a melancholic thread that imbues the novel- the sense of sinking within the peat bog - a dark pull into this past world and a disconnection from the present day.

Sheila Armstrong's writing powerfully pulls us into each life and vividly creates the brooding atmosphere of the landscape.

Intriguing and brooding- a novel full of imagery that will linger

Thank you to Bloomsbury Circus publishing and Netgalley for the advance copy.