Helen Marshall is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her collections Hair Side, Flesh Side, and Gifts for the One Who Come After (ChiZine, 2013 & 2015) were critically acclaimed by the likes of Benjamin Percy and Neil Gaiman, with latter awarded the World Fantasy Award. Her debut novel The Migration (Random House / Titan, 2019), was named a Guardian best novel of the year. Her works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Aurora Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award.
Brought up in Toronto, she is a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, and now teaches creative writing at the University of Queensland where she lives with her husband and young child. Her next novel The Lady, the Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death (“channels the best of Angela Carter then takes it up a notch or three” – A.G. Slatter) is forthcoming from Titan Books in June.
The Lady, The Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death
Titan Books, 2025 (forthcoming) | Waterstones (pre-order)
A young woman is seduced by the glamour of the circus and drawn into a dangerous world of violence, cruelty and revenge.
As Sara Sidorova hovers between life and death, she is visited by Amba, the tiger god who will devour creation if he is released from the chains that bind him. Amba gives Sara an extraordinary gift: a glimpse into the future.
Years later, her granddaughter Irenda will grow up in a war-torn country where survival means obedience. When a devastating attack robs her of her parents, she travels to Hrana City. There, her grandmother agrees to teach her the ultimate secret: how to tame death. In the circus, amongst the magicians, the strongmen and the contortionists, she will start down a dangerous road, to carry out a revenge decades in the making… and bring justice into the world for herself and for her family.
Rich with glamour and strangeness, brutality and deceit and the dark magic of the circus, this haunting fable from a multi award-winning author will chill your bones and make your heart ache.
The Migration
Titan Books, 2019 | Waterstones
When I was younger I didn’t know a thing about death. I thought it meant stillness, a body gone limp. A marionette with its strings cut. Death was like a long vacation – a going away. Storms and flooding are worsening around the world, and a mysterious immune disorder has begun to afflict the young.
Sophie Perella is about to begin her senior year of high school in Toronto when her little sister, Kira, is diagnosed. Their parents’ marriage falters under the strain, and Sophie’s mother takes the girls to Oxford, England, to live with their Aunt Irene. An Oxford University professor and historical epidemiologist obsessed with relics of the Black Death, Irene works with a centre that specializes in treating people with the illness. She is a friend to Sophie, and offers a window into a strange and ancient history of human plague and recovery. Sophie just wants to understand what’s happening now; but as mortality rates climb, and reports emerge of bodily tremors in the deceased, it becomes clear there is nothing normal about this condition – and that the dead aren’t staying dead. When Kira succumbs, Sophie faces an unimaginable choice: let go of the sister she knows, or take action to embrace something terrifying and new.
Tender and chilling, unsettling and hopeful, The Migration is a story of a young woman’s dawning awareness of mortality and the power of the human heart to thrive in cataclysmic circumstances.