New book: Red Bead Woman

Acclaimed scholar and mythteller Dr Martin Shaw has committed to writing this jewel of a tale from the Taiga of Siberia.

And alongside this story and commentary are brand new drawings – scattered like seed throughout.

This book depicts an ancient story for troubled times, beginning with the longing of an old woman who, from the deep roots of a mare’s tail plant, births a girl who can rebuild culture, revive relationship between the centre and the edge, the village and the forest. But to do that, she has to have a voice first.

But sometimes it is only when life is so jagged and uncertain that we learn to speak at all. Red Bead Woman petitions for a culture of wildness: an unruly, highly infectious pandemic of beauty. That in the midst of ghoulish conspiracy theory and jaded respectability, we still may take a deep breath, do the work, and start to find out just what a red bead speech could want from us. This heartrending and mysterious work has all the sudden twists of feeling that lets us know we are in the presence of something magnificent.

Copies posted before Christmas will be signed by Martin.