The Bog Wife
core novel 2024 The Bog Wife
Record
| First published | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.57 (16,376 ratings, collected 2026-08-19) |
| Page count | 336 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781640096622 |
Synopsis
The Bog Wife follows the Haddesley family, who live in a deteriorating manor in West Virginia and have maintained a dark generational ritual: sacrificing the family patriarch to an ancestral cranberry bog in exchange for a bog-born wife to continue the family line. When patriarch Charles Haddesley XI dies, his five adult children -- Eda, Charlie, Wenna, Percy and Nora -- bury him in the bog as tradition demands, but this time the bog fails to produce a replacement wife. The failure sends the siblings down diverging paths as they confront the unraveling of their family's foundational beliefs, with one sibling discovering that much of the family's supposed centuries-long history has been fabricated, forcing all five to reckon with what their inheritance actually means once the covenant that has bound them together no longer holds.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Bog Wife
- Series: not part of a registered series (standalone work within its universe)
- Author: Kay Chronister
Awards (verified)
- World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (Best Novel), 2025: nominated; Confirmed directly via sfadb's own 2025 World Fantasy Awards results page; did not win (The Tainted Cup, already admitted, won that year).
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Bog Wife
- sfadb: World Fantasy Awards 2025
- https://counterpointpress.com/dd-product/the-bog-wife/
- 2025 WFC Nominations and Winners (World Fantasy Convention)
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