Marrow

A searing take on femininity and power, Marrow transports readers to a small island off the coast of Maine, where a coven has done the seemingly impossible.

The day Oona was kicked out of her mother’s coven, she gave up on her dreams of harnessing the witchcraft that was her birthright. Years later, she’s carved out an ordinary life with her husband, though she is filled with a longing she can barely name. If she could only become a mother, then--according to island lore--she will come into her magic.

But after years of being unable to carry a pregnancy to term, Oona begins to feel desperate. Without the money to seek medical treatment, she decides she must return to the rugged, windswept island where she was raised--and to her dark, enigmatic mother . . . a witch who gives childless women the chance to become mothers.

Oona returns under the cover of anonymity, hoping for an answer. But, despite a celebrity clientele and a long wait-list, there are dark forces at work on the island, and as her time there grows more harrowing, the truth threatens to come to light. How far will Oona go to access the power her mother commands?

Tender and intense, witchy and wise, and written in prose that glitters and seethes, Marrow is a gripping novel about the complex bonds between mothers and daughters, about what we must believe in order to imagine a future for ourselves, and what we must let go in order to fully live it.

Samantha Browning Shea is an author and the vice president of Georges Borchardt, Inc. A graduate of Colgate University, Samantha lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters. Marrow is her debut novel.