There is a glossary that sings with Griffith’s power to bring readers as if lightly into far distant times, where a gesith is an elite warrior, October is Winterfylleth, and undern is the time from nine in the morning to noon. Hild, daughter of a dead prince and a dangerous mother, learns to watch the natural world and listen carefully to the talk of all around her, whether it be in Anglisc, British, or Irish. The book begins and ends with the sound of a bird call changing from “Outward! Outward!” to “Home now! Home!” The bird is a jackdaw, and that specificity matters very much to the story. In Hild, she has written a historical novel of thrilling depth. Griffith moves easily between genres, from science fiction to noir thriller and back, always with a taut language sense and an elegant, fast-moving story. Her character Aud Torvingen, is the protagonist of three novels in which Griffith’s embodied meditations on grief, trust and communities of support include self-defense classes, cavernous bars, and spiky queer ways of dressing and being, along with subtle observations of city life. Her work is full of women with gripping lives who have intense sexual and emotional relationships with each other. She has also written short stories, essays and a memoir. Griffith has written five previous novels.

Reading Hild is an urgent, expansive pleasure. Hild–so young, sharp and tall–is very much a human being, and her story grabs a reader like a king’s gesith grabs a sword.

In it, a girl whose mother has dreamed her to be the light of the world finds out more about what that means than most human beings could bear. Her new novel, Hild, about the most powerful woman in seventh century Britain, is magnificent. Nicola Griffith is a brilliant, prolific, entertaining, risk-taking writer.

Hild by nicola griffith