Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

Product Information

To read Daisy Johnson is to have that rare feeling of meeting an author you’ll read for the rest of your life. It has both given me a much longer TBR pile, and also made me want to complete a 'Hag tour' so I can explore the areas it describes. The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter. Neon lights will be delivered in 2-4 weeks, as they are made in small batches and shipped separately from other items.

Her novel, Butterfly Fish , and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch , have won and been nominated for multiple awards. The cover art is wonderful and I loved the fact that they went with the name HAG to try and reclaim the insult to women. Thanks to Virage, Little Brown and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The first tale is 'A Retelling' by Daisy Johnson, tackling the tale of the Green Children through a combination of magical realism and meta-fiction. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Hag features the re-tellings of dark folktales written by talented women from Daisy Johnson to Eimear McBride. While the stories are all told in vastly different ways, they all leave you with the feeling that maybe there is something more out there. All of the stories are set in and around the UK, but some carry flavours from their author’s cultural experiences and heritage that enrichen the style and content of the stories, and add layers to these stories of female ‘otherness’. Drawn from illuminated manuscripts and other folkloric traditions, these stories have been revised and reimagined by authors local to each region. She co-presented the BBC's Turn Up for The Books podcast, alongside Simon Savidge and Bastille frontman Dan Smith.

The stories in Hag were originally published as Audible Originals, and I can see that that would probably work wonders for this one. A fellow and Vice Chair of The Royal Society of Literature, she is the co-presenter of the BBC's Novels That Shaped Our World podcast, Turn Up For The Books.

They are not a part of popular culture the way fairy stories from other countries have become, via the Brothers Grimm and, eventually, Disney. She keeps all the bare bones of the original story, in which the Tudor courtier Sir John Giffard kills the panther from his menagerie of curious animals before it can attack a woman and child. We even have a panther, the Goddess Kali, tales of exploitation, trauma, and the exploration of the relationship between sisters.

Hag is a collection of forgotten folktales wildly reimagined by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today.The stories all had links to the mythology present in their original tales, but with over arching themes of nature and feminism.

As with all story collections there were hits and misses, but I enjoyed the majority of them and I liked that the original tales were included at the end of the book. We know tales that originated in Germany and Italy but not, with a few exceptions, those associated with our own towns and villages. Some general thoughts: these stories are totally accessible even if you have no idea what they are based on (like I did), which I think is no mean feat.It is interesting to note how the subject-matter provides a unifying thread among the featured works, despite the variety of styles and approaches. It understands that the most mundane things in life are a rich source of comedy and that they often go hand in hand with every day tragedy .