Strange sons, dangerous daughters - by Imogen Russell Williams (Paperback)

About the Book

Strange sons, dangerous daughters: Four Branches of the Mabinogi by Imogen Russell Williams is a sustained poetic engagement with the medieval Welsh prose tales, refracted through a contemporary feminist intelligence.

Book Synopsis

Strange sons, dangerous daughters: Four Branches of the Mabinogi by Imogen Russell Williams is a sustained poetic engagement with the medieval Welsh prose tales, refracted through a contemporary feminist intelligence. Russell Williams works in sequences that move between mortal and divine, human and animal, those who act and those acted upon, voicing not only Rhiannon, Branwen, Goewin, Arianrhod, and Blodeuedd, but also the stag, the dog, the starling, the mare, the gallows, and the mouse. Accompanied by Chris Riddell's illustrations, the collection reckons with the cruelty embedded in inherited story while restoring weight to figures the source narratives leave bruised or unheard.

Review Quotes

This is a perfect book for those nights where the world is full of darkness and mystery and there is some kind of old, powerful magic in the air.

- Daniel Handler

Imogen Russell Williams' brilliant new re-telling (re-dreaming) of the Mabinogi grips, fascinates and unsettles. In its snap-cutting between perspectives, voices and species, in its sanguineous bites and vivid visions, and in its branching, antlered form, it somehow finds a way to breathe in the ancient and exhale the modern. Strange, eerie and animate, it morphs and metamorphs on the page and in the mind.

- Robert Macfarlane

Beautiful, original, vivid, sexy, angry, intelligent, wise

- Katherine Rundell

...Elegant, properly spare and focused, but also full of very physical sensation, really vivid evocations of stuff and smell and touch

- Rowan Williams

...Fierce and bloody and fleshy; cleverly singling out key moments, always maintaining the momentum and getting to the human heart of the matter

- Kevin Crossley-Holland

Unique, enchanting, otherworldly, in a league of its own

- Laura Dockrill