The Red Mouth

by Sheila Armstrong, Unknown Author

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

Genres: Ireland, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Hardcover

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

[Sofie De Smyter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. The depth of the characters. The descriptions of nature. Everything.

[Nicola]

Fair to say I was blown away by this book, an accidental find on BorrowBox. Whatever they put in the water in Ireland -maybe good arts funding and a long tradition of beautiful storytelling - this book has it in full. It tells the stories that are unearthed when an ancient body is found in a peat bog - the man whose dog found the site, the peat-cutter whose handiwork has been replaced by machines, the archaeologist for whom the discovery is a step in his career, his troubled family and Maeve, the angst-ridden young environmental scientist who is there to review the impact of peat-cutting, and not forgetting the lovely dog, whose mind we also enter. The writing is awesome - rightly praised by Annie Proulx and Sarah Moss - but it also has a captivating story, with characters that I really cared about, lots of really fascinating information about bog bodies, which are at the centre of the various characters' lives, as well as being full of almost offhand little apercus that beautifully sum up something you may have noticed but not quite recognised in that way: the tutor "who was not successful enough to be as patronising as he was", the lurcher rotating on the couch to curl up, "crossing her front paws as elegant as a secretary". The description of the chronically anxious and socially awkward Maeve is done with such a light touch and so elegantly that I felt I properly understood the anguish of many younger people I've met who find the simplest social encounter fraught with worry. Armstrong is also able to transport the reader across centuries, seeing the connections across time: the scope of this reminded me a bit of Orbital, with its meditative style, and captured in so few words. I lost momentum towards the end, as if it went on slightly too long and maybe a bit overblown but I will try to re-read it some time to see if that part makes any more sense to me.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, great insights re characters, but a bit disjointed, and somewhat lacking.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicola’s find: another young Irish author of prodigious talent. It must be something in the water. You could dip anywhere in this book and find a phrase or sentence of elegance, beauty and surprise: ‘The museum is a rounded bloat of a building, pushing out onto the road like a drunk’s firm belly’ – there, I just did. A little digging (pun intended) suggests the idea for this short novel came from the human remains uncovered in a County Derry bog in 2023. Originally thought to belong to a male aged between 13 and 17 years, they were later identified as a young woman who lived around 2,000 years ago (Armstrong reverses this sex change).

Armstrong peels back the layers of her story just as her characters, all somehow related by birth or design, pare away the seams of sphagnum moss and peat of the bog that dominates the landscape and both conceals and preserves the past. Difficult not to think of Heaney's poems, especially 'Bogland' from Wintering Out with its 'Great Irish Elk', drawn from the bog and erected as 'an astounding crate full of air' and (more controversially) 'Bog Queen', which despite the justifiable feminist critique is a poem I love still.

There are some charming structural features: each chapter is dedicated to a month and each section a Gaelic season: Imbolc, Bealtaine, Samhain, Lughnasadh. It was occasionally hard to retrieve all the familial details of each of the four narrators as they are only given one short chapter in turns and there are other protagonists who are also important to the story: Katrina, Aunt Áine, Tomás’ wife Mairead, Bridgit’s sister Laoise and more; Armstrong is never satisfied with a sketch and always gives enough detail to make her characters stand up and be counted. The most significant protagonist who is not a narrator is Liam Fleming, who prowls the book as a contradictory figure, both in his flair and charisma and in his rage and neglect. The scattering of Irish and German words is cleverly done – not too many and always at the right moment, making me want to re-visit both those languages again. And, of course, top marks for the Lurcher: Armstrong’s rescue dogs appear in the acknowledgements, so no surprise in the faithful accuracy of her fictional dog’s shape, habits, soul.

All that said, it’s not my perfect novel. Sometimes I found the prose rich and treacly, and noticed how it compares with the (similarly historically themed) May We Feed the King, which has such precision and lightness in its wording. Think of a chilled cucumber and avocado soup compared to Black Forest Cherry Cake: it all depends on how hungry you are, and for what.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

somewhere between 3-4 stars

sheila armstrong clearly knows prose. her sentences are beautifully crafted and truly evoke emotions. at times, however, the prose does feel a little overdone, a bit too lyrical.

unfortunately, beautiful prose is not all a novel is. while i did enjoy the plot, the pacing seemed to drag in parts and made it difficult to even want to finish a chapter. the jumping povs and timelines added another layer of confusion on top.

[Maura Heaphy Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I almost gave up on this, after 100-odd pages -- struggling with the feeling that it was too poetical, too clever for its own good. And then I hit this ...

... 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 arm beating of a heart, the warm beating of many hearts, of a million, billion hearts.

And I felt like I was falling headlong, into eternity.

And I was hooked, as if on the magnificent antlers of the Irish Elk (which is, with delicious irony, neither exclusively Irish, nor an elk).

There is so much to marvel at here: the quadrille of Armstrong's complicated structure, in which the 12 chapters follows the calendar of Irish months (Lúnasa, Samhain, Bealtaine, etc) , but each one follows the perspective of four different people and skips around in time, maddeningly separate, until their connections are finally teased out.

... things happen, one after the other, and there is no smooth, parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints of a life..

I am a bit of a sucker for bog bodies: bog bodies, and Egyptian mummies, child sacrifices, mummified by the cold dry air of the Andes, accidental mummies such as Ötzi, the Iceman, preserved with all his worldly goods in the dry cold of the Tyrolean Alps. I find them oddly moving: times travellers, whose untimely (violent, sacrificial, accidental) deaths have given them a kind of immortality. Armstrong and I would clearly have a lot to talk about, and she handles the evolving story of the Belroe "Woman" with great sensitivity. Highly recommended.

... only us, only now ....

For some reason, The Red Mouth isn't coming up in Add a Quote, so I will put this here until it does ....
The day is brisk and cold and glassy, a precarious sky and a peeled-fingernail moon, but there are others in the distance: an elderly man with a small dog, the drifting murmur of a radio. The slow shuffle of a pair of walkers linked arm in arm, on a low tarmacked path. Two figures, on big, one small, following a dog that flies across the landscape like an elf-shot arrow. None of them pass close enough to speak to her, and for that she is grateful.

[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.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love anything about bogs, bog bodies, burials, ancient rites, folklore and the like and I really liked this book.

Several interconnecting stories, beautifully written, some of the writng literally gave me goosebumps. It was also raw and human and the characters were well formed and real. 4.5 stars.

[Laura King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great now I'm scared of bogs too

[Jamad · Rating 4 out of 5]

The discovery of ancient elk antlers and the body of a two-thousand-year-old woman in an Irish bog links four lives across half a century. As archaeologists, peat-cutters, family members and scientists grapple with what has been uncovered, the novel explores memory, history, grief and the stories we choose to preserve or leave buried.

This is one of those novels that lingers long after the final page. Sheila Armstrong writes beautifully, but there is substance beneath the lyricism. The shifting perspectives gradually build a rich picture of people whose lives have all been altered, directly or indirectly, by the bog and what it yields.

There are so many memorable passages, but this was the one that stayed with me: “Brigitte did not attend the internment: dirt is dirt, bone is bone, ash is ash and gone is gone.” It captures the novel’s unsentimental honesty about loss while saying so much in a single sentence.

The atmosphere is wonderfully realised, with the bog becoming as important as any of the characters. History, archaeology and the natural world are woven seamlessly into the story without ever overwhelming the human drama.

A thoughtful, beautifully written novel that quietly gathers emotional weight as it unfolds.

[Blaithin Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars

[Mairead Byrne · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d like to be transported to a bog immediately

[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.