Latest News
2nd November 2009
Tender Morsels has won the Best Book of the Year Award at the 2009 World Fantasy Awards!
Find out more on Margo’s blog

Rollrock island is a lonely rock of gulls and waves, blunt fishermen and their homely wives. Life is hard for the families who must wring a poor living from the stormy seas. But Rollrock is also a place of magic - the scary, salty-real sort of magic that changes lives forever. Down on the windswept beach, where the seals lie in herds, the outcast sea witch Misskaella casts her spells - and brings forth girls from the sea - girls with long, pale limbs and faces of haunting innocence and loveliness - the most enchantingly lovely girls the fishermen of Rollrock have ever seen.

But magic always has its price. A fisherman may have and hold a sea bride, and tell himself that he is her master. But from his first look into those wide, questioning, liquid eyes, he will be just as transformed as she is. He will be equally ensnared. And in the end the witch will always have her payment.

Margo Lanagan has written an extraordinary tale of desire, despair and transformation. In devastatingly beautiful prose, she reveals unforgettable characters capable of unspeakable cruelty - and deep unspoken love. After reading about the Rollrock fishermen and their sea brides, the world will not seem the same.



Everything I could hope for in a book. Beautiful
Jackie Morris

Beautifully written with great confidence and vigour
We Love This Book

Outstanding . . . Nothing is predictable in this astonishing novel, which expands on classic tales about selkie brides with unsettling imaginative thoroughness
Amanda CraigThe Times

Enthralling . . . This beautifully written story will keep readers enchanted until the very last page
Booktrust

A new Lanagan novel is an event to be met with both delight and a faint dread: it’s likely to be excellent, but it’ll also put you through the emotional wringer. Brides is indeed not a cheerful tale, but it is a richly nuanced one . . . Bleakly beautiful, highly atmospheric
SFX

As she paints images for us of Daniel's brief life under the waves as a seal, she shows writing of the highest order: subtle, powerful, poetic
Marcus SedwickGuardian

Readers will find themselves beguiled by Lanagan’s deliciously unsettling and haunting prose
Sunday Telegraph

It reads like a classic. It is a wonderful book and it is unlikely that many better will be published in the genre this year. Existing fans of Lanagan should rejoice and I strongly suggest that those who have not already read her work, do so
Fantasy Book Review

A haunting, masterfully crafted novel that, as one should by now expect from Lanagan, isn’t a bit like anything else
Booklist

A gorgeous piece of work, perhaps less startling and visceral than Tender Morsels, but in many ways a richer and more complex novel
Locus Online

Wonderfully unpredictable — never letting the reader become complacent, never letting the prose be any less than pitch-perfect
Dawn.com

A brilliant novel that draws you in to its particular world and holds you spellbound
Annalise TaylorCarousel

Margo Lanagan has a unique, uncompromising and lyrical voice and she brings it to the folk myth of selkies in a soaring journey of passion and pain . . . Heartstoppingly gorgeous. Five stars
The Bookbag

Each of Lanagan’s six narrators comes fully formed into the reading mind: two generations and six perspectives shape the story of a whole community and how it bears the consequences of its own cold-heartedness
The Horn Book

The writing is captivating, full of warmth, beauty and understanding and there is much for any reader to take from this fascinating story
Armadillo Magazine

Margo Lanagan is a writer of such soaring talent that it is almost impossible to do justice to her creations in a review . . . Readers will find themselves beguiled by Lanagan's deliciously unsettling and haunting prose
Dinah HallDaily Telegraph

Margo Lanagan’s writing is dangerously beautiful; it knows how to dance, and it knows how to fight
Mal Peet