From Eve and Pandora, Marzanna and the Morrigan,
traditional accounts of how Death came into the world usually put the blame on
women. In How Death Came into the World, Nancy Charley offers some
startlingly alternative explanations. Exploring those dark forests of myth
where every tale is ‘an acorn of truth’, she retells some old stories and
conjures up some new ones to make sense of the relationship between painful
death and bloody birth. How Death Came into the World is a collection of
weird and wise fireside tales about grandmothers, mothers and daughters, the unshawled,
the unheard and the undead. It’s a book of burrows and burials, murmurs and
murmurations, of lost coins and lost children, the dreams of fish, the ravenous
grief of bears and the matted fur beneath the skin.