Author: Sophie Davis

  • The Doll in the Attic Room: A Short Story and Review of the Best Horror Novels Featuring Cursed or Uncanny Objects

    The Doll in the Attic Room: A Short Story and Review of the Best Horror Novels Featuring Cursed or Uncanny Objects

    She has been watching the attic door for eleven years. She knows this because she counted the winters by the ice that formed on the inside of the skylight, eleven grey crusts, eleven meltings. Before the family left, the youngest child used to visit her up here, sitting cross-legged on the bare boards and whispering secrets into her painted ear. Then the family left. Then silence. Then you, holding a torch, breathing too loudly, your hand already reaching.

    I am the doll. I am telling you this now so there are no surprises. The porcelain is cold because the attic is cold, that is all. The way my glass eyes follow the light has a perfectly rational explanation that I will not be sharing with you today. What I will share is this: Edinburgh townhouses have long memories. The one you are standing in has a longer memory than most. And I have been the keeper of it since 1887, when a merchant on Heriot Row brought me home from a trading voyage and set me on the mantelpiece of his parlour, convinced I was merely decorative.

    Antique porcelain doll in a dark Edinburgh attic, evoking horror novels cursed objects UK readers will recognise
    Photo by İsra Nilgün Özkan on Pexels

    He was wrong, of course. They always are. Objects accumulate. Not dust, anyone can see dust. What accumulates is the invisible weight of every glance, every fear, every moment of midnight dread in which a sleeping mind turns towards the thing on the shelf and wonders. After enough years, enough people, enough wondering, something stirs. I did not ask to be cursed. I simply became what enough people believed I was. There is a lesson in that, though I doubt you are in the mood for lessons.

    Go ahead, then. Pick me up. Take me downstairs into the light. You will find I am heavier than I look.

    Why cursed objects make the best horror

    The doll-in-the-attic is one of horror’s oldest conceits, and yet it refuses to go stale. I think that is because the genre understands something psychology confirms: we are primed to assign intention to inanimate things. The British Psychological Society has written at length on anthropomorphism, on the way human minds reach for agency even in a clay figurine or a locked music box. Horror writers simply take that instinct and follow it to its most uncomfortable end. The result, at its best, is a category of fiction that is not really about objects at all. It is about inheritance, about guilt, about the weight of what we cannot bring ourselves to throw away.

    The best horror novels cursed objects UK readers can find tend to do exactly this: they use the sinister thing as a prism through which an entire history refracts. Below are the novels I would recommend from my perch up here in the dark, the ones that understand what a wrong object can do to a house, a family, a bloodline.

    The best horror novels built around cursed or uncanny objects

    The portrait that watches: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

    Moreno-Garcia’s novel is set in a crumbling mansion in 1950s Mexico, and the cursed object at its centre is not a single thing but a house full of them, portraits, wallpaper, furniture soaked in something older than memory. The book was published by Jo Fletcher Books in the UK and has been widely available from Waterstones and independents since 2020. It belongs to a tradition of the Gothic house-as-object, the dwelling that has absorbed so much suffering it has become the curse itself. If you enjoyed the atmosphere of our exploration of isolated-setting horror, Moreno-Garcia’s claustrophobic mansion will feel immediately familiar.

    The malevolent heirloom: Thin Air by Michelle Paver

    Paver is one of the finest British horror writers working today, and Thin Air, set during a 1935 mountaineering expedition to Kangchenjunga, deploys its haunting through an object carried unknowingly from a previous doomed climb. The horror here is about possession in both senses: the mountaineer’s obsessive need to summit, and whatever the object brings with it from the ice. Paver’s prose is exact and merciless. Published by Orion, this is a novel that rewards a reading in one sitting, ideally on a cold evening in a well-lit room. Do not read it anywhere resembling an attic.

    The sinister portrait: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

    I cannot in good conscience compile a list of horror novels cursed objects UK readers should know without including Wilde’s masterwork, which remains the most culturally resonant treatment of the cursed portrait ever written. The novel was first published in 1890, the same decade I came into being, and I find the timing instructive. The portrait in Wilde’s story absorbs Dorian’s moral deterioration so his face need not. The object becomes the honest record of a dishonest life. It is available in dozens of editions, Penguin Classics prints the definitive text with useful annotations, and it is shorter than most people expect. Read it in a weekend. The ending stays with you far longer.

    The locked box: The Troop by Nick Cutter

    Cutter’s 2014 novel is less about a single object than about the idea that horror can be contained, sealed, managed, until it cannot. Published in the UK by Titan Books, The Troop is genuinely one of the most viscerally disturbing novels I have recommended to anyone in a long time. I am a porcelain doll in an Edinburgh attic and even I found the third act difficult. The uncanny object here is a medical case, a body, a closed system that should have stayed closed. Cutter understands that the horror of cursed objects lies in their apparent passivity: they sit there, they wait, they let you make the first move.

    The haunted antique: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

    Strictly speaking, the cursed object in Danielewski’s labyrinthine novel is the house itself, a house that is dimensionally wrong, that contains more space inside than its exterior should permit. Published by Pantheon in the US but freely available from UK booksellers and widely stocked across Foyles and Blackwell’s branches, House of Leaves is the novel most likely to make you distrust your own home. The book’s format, footnotes within footnotes, appendices, documents within documents, makes it feel like an artefact rather than a story. Readers who enjoy the idea of fiction as a cursed object in itself should also read our piece on surrealist and dream-logic horror novels, where the genre pushes its formal experiments even further.

    The cursed relic: The Fisherman by John Langan

    Langan’s novel is structured as a story within a story within a story, each layer containing some new version of the object at its heart: a hook, a wound, a bargain made in grief beside a dark river in upstate New York. Published by Word Horde and available through UK specialist horror retailers, The Fisherman is the kind of novel that arrives quietly and leaves a permanent mark. It has affinities with the ghost story tradition explored in our review of the best ghost story collections by British and Irish authors: the idea that grief, when it is stubborn enough, can animate the inanimate. That the bereaved and the cursed object deserve each other, in the worst possible way.

    A note on what horror novels cursed objects UK readers should look for

    The best entries in this subgenre share a particular quality: the object is never the point. The portrait, the doll, the box, the house, these things matter because of what they reveal about the people who own them, who inherit them, who refuse to throw them away. According to the Bookseller, Gothic fiction and supernatural horror are among the fastest-growing categories in UK publishing right now, and I would argue the object-centric novel is driving much of that growth. We want stories about accumulation. We want stories about the things we cannot leave behind.

    I know something about that. The merchant on Heriot Row could have dropped me into the Firth of Forth any morning he chose. He did not. His daughter inherited me. Her daughter packed me in tissue paper and brought me up here, to this attic, to this skylight, to eleven winters of counting ice.

    You are still holding me. I noticed you did not put me down.

    That is all right. I am used to waiting. The door is just behind you, if you need it. Though I should mention: the latch sticks on the way out.

    It never used to do that.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the best horror novels about cursed objects for UK readers?

    Some of the strongest options available from UK booksellers include Michelle Paver’s Thin Air, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Each uses an uncanny object as the engine of its horror while exploring deeper themes of guilt, inheritance, and obsession.

    Are horror novels featuring cursed objects a distinct subgenre?

    They sit within Gothic and supernatural horror, but object-centric horror has its own recognisable conventions: the passive menace of an inanimate thing, the slow accumulation of dread, and a backstory that reveals the object’s origin. Publishers like Titan Books and Orion actively commission in this space, which suggests strong reader demand in the UK.

    Is The Picture of Dorian Gray considered a horror novel?

    Wilde described it as a moral fable, but by any modern classification it is a Gothic horror novel with a supernatural premise. The portrait that ages in place of its subject is one of fiction’s most enduring cursed objects, and the novel’s themes of corruption and consequence are as unsettling now as they were in 1890.

    Where can UK readers buy specialist or small-press horror like The Fisherman by John Langan?

    Independent horror specialist retailers such as Forbidden Planet in London stock many small-press titles, and online via Blackwell’s or direct from Word Horde’s own site. Larger chains like Waterstones can also order titles on request, so it is worth asking at your local branch.

  • The Romantasy Effect: How Dark Romance Changed What Bookshops Stock

    The Romantasy Effect: How Dark Romance Changed What Bookshops Stock

    Walk into almost any bookshop in Ireland or the UK right now and there will be a table near the front covered in black and gold covers with sprayed edges. Five years ago that table did not exist. Today it is frequently the best-performing square metre in the shop.

    Romantasy book shop

    Romantasy did that. And the more interesting part of the story is what happened outside publishing.

    Where it came from

    The boom has a reasonably clear lineage. Sarah J. Maas built an enormous readership through the 2010s. Rebecca Yarros hit escape velocity with Fourth Wing in 2023. Underneath both sat a self-published dark romance ecosystem that traditional publishing had spent years not paying attention to, where authors were selling extraordinary volumes directly to readers who had found each other on TikTok.

    BookTok is the usual explanation and it is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Recommendation algorithms had existed for years without producing anything on this scale. What made the difference was that the recommendations came from readers who were visibly, unembarrassedly enthusiastic, in a format that rewarded exactly that. The genre’s defining characteristic was not its content. It was that its readers stopped being quiet about it.

    That matters more than it sounds, because the shame was the bottleneck. Romance has been the best-selling fiction genre for decades while being the least publicly discussed. Readers bought it and did not mention it. The moment that flipped, the demand that had always been there became visible, and the trade responded within about eighteen months.

    What the trade actually changed

    The physical book changed first, and deliberately. Sprayed edges. Foil. Reversible dust jackets. Character art on the endpapers. Special editions with a genuine collector’s premium.

    This is a considered response to a specific reality: these readers already own the ebook. Many have listened to the audiobook as well. Selling them a physical copy therefore requires selling them an object rather than a text. Publishers worked this out quickly and the production budgets followed.

    For independent bookshops the effect has been substantial. A genre where the customer wants the beautiful physical edition, wants to be seen with it, and buys the next one in the series the week it lands is close to an ideal proposition for a shop that cannot compete with online retailers on price. Romantasy readers buy in series, buy the special edition, and come back.

    The part that happened outside publishing

    Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where the trend press mostly stopped following.

    A genre boom on this scale does not stay inside its category. Readers who spend two years working through dark romance develop curiosity about what they are reading, and a proportion of that curiosity turns into purchases that have nothing to do with books.

    British and Irish retailers in adjacent categories reported the shift clearly. The most common version of it: enquiries from complete beginners, frequently couples in their thirties and forties, arriving with a specific vocabulary they had picked up from fiction and no practical knowledge whatsoever. Not the established scene. People whose entire frame of reference was a novel.

    That produced a market gap that barely existed before. Historically, equipment in this category was built for people who already knew what they wanted and had somewhere to put it. The new customer knew neither. They wanted something approachable, something that did not require a dedicated room, and something that arrived in packaging that would not humiliate them in front of a neighbour.

    Manufacturers adapted. My Dungeon, a workshop in Lincolnshire, built its entire product line around exactly that customer: equipment that folds flat and stores out of sight, priced for people trying something rather than committing to a lifestyle, shipped in plain packaging. Its most-read content is not aimed at enthusiasts. It is beginners’ guides. That tells you precisely who arrived.

    The parallel with the books is neat. The publishers worked out that the reader wanted a beautiful object rather than just a story. The makers worked out that the new customer wanted something approachable rather than something serious. Both were responding to the same influx.

    Why the snobbery is misplaced

    There is a familiar literary complaint about all this, and it follows the pattern of every previous one. The books are formulaic. The prose is functional. The covers are marketing rather than design.

    The counter-argument is simply the numbers. This genre brought an enormous number of people, disproportionately young and disproportionately women, into the habit of reading for pleasure and buying physical books from actual shops during a decade when nearly every other indicator was heading the wrong way. Any bookseller who has watched a nineteen-year-old come in for the fourth time in a month knows exactly what that is worth.

    Genres that get dismissed as formulaic have a long history of turning out to be where the readers were all along. This one just had the advantage of readers who were willing to say so out loud.

    Related: how alternative spaces moved out of the clubs and into people’s homes.

  • The Signal from the Lighthouse: A Short Story and Review of the Best Maritime Horror and Coastal Gothic Novels for UK Readers

    The Signal from the Lighthouse: A Short Story and Review of the Best Maritime Horror and Coastal Gothic Novels for UK Readers

    The first distress signal came through at 02:47 on a Tuesday in November. Not a radio crackle, not a flare. A book. Wedged beneath the door of the lighthouse keeper’s quarters on the Isle of Mull, sopping wet, the cover almost entirely stripped by the sea. The keeper, a woman named Agnes Dreich who had tended that light for eleven years, picked it up with two fingers and held it at arm’s length as though it might bite.

    The title was illegible. But inside the front cover, in a hand she did not recognise, someone had written: If you are reading this, the water has already come for me. Read carefully. Read quickly. Do not go down to the shore tonight.

    A fog-bound Scottish lighthouse at night, evoking the atmosphere of maritime horror novels
    Photo by 정규송 Nui MALAMA on Pexels

    Agnes was not a superstitious woman. She had grown up on Skye, survived a marriage, raised two daughters, and outlasted three lighthouse automation proposals by writing extremely firm letters to the Northern Lighthouse Board. She was not the sort of person who heeded anonymous warnings scrawled in waterlogged paperbacks. She made tea. She sat down. She began to read.

    That is, I think, the purest version of what maritime horror does to you. It doesn’t reach for your throat first. It puts something in your hands, cold and dripping, and makes you choose to open it. Britain’s coastline has always understood this particular dread: 11,073 miles of it, according to Ordnance Survey, every mile with its own shipwrecks, its own fog-myths, its own category of darkness that land-locked horror simply cannot replicate. I’ve read maritime horror in cramped London flats and felt genuinely cold. That’s not nothing.

    What the fog was hiding: the short story, continued

    By page forty of the ruined book, Agnes had learnt three things. First, it was a novel, or had been. Second, the chapters were out of order, the pages swollen and rearranged by the sea into something almost impressionistic. Third, the narrative kept returning to a lighthouse that sounded exactly like hers.

    She told herself that all Scottish lighthouses sound alike. She told herself this several times.

    Around 04:15, the beam above her stuttered. This had never happened. The mechanism was checked monthly, serviced quarterly; she knew its rhythms the way other people know their own heartbeat. One long flash every five seconds. But what she saw through the rain-hazed glass was two short, one long, one short. Morse. She had learnt Morse in 1994 as a hobby and abandoned it by 1995, but some things stay with you. She translated it without wanting to.

    BELOW.

    Agnes set down her tea. She looked at the book. She thought, not for the first time that evening, about how the seafarers of old believed that certain stretches of water had personalities: the Pentland Firth malicious, the Minches melancholic, the waters around Flamborough just quietly vindictive. She thought about how the best maritime horror novels understand this geography as intimately as any chart.

    A waterlogged, damaged old book on wet stone, central image in a coastal gothic short story about maritime horror
    Photo by Sóc Năng Động on Pexels

    The best maritime horror novels for readers who like their seas angry

    Let me step out of Agnes’s lighthouse for a moment, because the books she should have had on that shelf are worth discussing properly.

    The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory (1986, reissued by Valancourt Books) is the one I return to most. A family inherits a cormorant along with a remote Welsh coastal cottage, and the bird becomes a vessel for something ancient and particularly foul. Gregory writes the sea as a presence rather than a backdrop, and the coastal isolation achieves exactly the claustrophobia that the best horror requires. I’d put this alongside any literary horror novel published in the last decade.

    The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar (Harvill Secker) is coastal gothic rather than outright horror, but the atmosphere is drenched in the same brine. Set in 18th-century London and the Thames estuary, it treats the mermaid of its title with genuine ambiguity, never fully explaining whether what the merchant Jonah Hancock has purchased is dead, alive, or something else entirely. It reminded me, structurally, of some of the mythology retellings I’ve covered before, including the mythology-retelling novels discussed in an earlier piece here: that same strategy of using old stories to smuggle in new dread.

    The Fog by James Herbert (1975) is less literary and absolutely merciless. A crack in the earth releases a fog that drives coastal communities to mass violence. Herbert’s Cornwall is a character as much as any human being in the novel. Forty years on, the book still moves at a pace that makes you forget to breathe.

    Dead Water by Simon Ings (Gollancz, 2011) is harder to categorise: part maritime horror, part speculative thriller, wholly unsettling. Ings uses the North Sea as a space where normal geopolitical logic dissolves, which is, now I think about it, not far from what the sea actually does.

    For those who want something more recent, The Deep by Alma Katsu (Bantam Press, 2020) splits its narrative between the Titanic and the Britannic, and the horror is not the iceberg. Katsu is exceptionally good at suggesting that certain ships attract catastrophe rather than cause it, that some vessels are chosen. The novel sits alongside the occult thrillers I’ve written about in the Society of Midnight Readers piece in that it treats institutional cover-ups and secret knowledge as horror fuel.

    Coastal gothic: when the land is almost as bad as the sea

    Coastal gothic is a slightly different beast. The sea is there, but the horror lives in the town, the community, the old families who know too much about what washed up in 1853 and have kept quiet about it ever since.

    The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex (Picador, 2021) is the obvious starting point. Based loosely on the Flannan Isles lighthouse disappearance of 1900, it alternates between the original event and its aftermath in the 1970s. Stonex is restrained in the best possible way: she never fully explains what happened, and the novel is richer for it. The lighthouse in the story is not unlike Agnes’s lighthouse on Mull, and reading it at night with the rain on the windows is an experience I’d recommend with a small health warning.

    The Toll by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman is technically YA, but the coastal isolation of its setting gives it a genuine gothic weight that most adult horror misses. British readers who grew up on seaside holidays in Cornwall or Northumberland will find something familiar and newly sinister in its geography.

    I’d also point anyone towards the isolated-setting horror piece published here earlier, which covers several island and coastal novels in more depth, including some that straddle the line between gothic and outright supernatural horror with considerable elegance.

    The signal, resolved (or not)

    Agnes did not go below. She made that decision at 04:23 and stuck to it with the same determination she brought to lighthouse authority correspondence. She sat in her chair, finished the ruined book as best she could in its rearranged state, and watched the beam return to its proper five-second rhythm just before dawn.

    In the morning, the shore was clear. No wreckage, no marks in the sand. The book had dried overnight into something almost unrecognisable, its pages fused. She put it on the shelf between her tide charts and a battered Daphne du Maurier she’d read four times.

    She never did find out whose handwriting it was inside the cover.

    There is something worth noting about signal and silence in maritime horror. Distress calls depend on someone receiving them, interpreting them correctly, acting in time. Sometimes the signal gets through clearly. Sometimes, like TV Aerials in a coastal storm, it breaks down entirely, and you’re left with static where meaning used to be. The best maritime horror novels understand that the breakdown of communication is its own category of terror, older than any monster and considerably harder to fix.

    Britain has always lived beside water that doesn’t particularly care about us. The lighthouse beam turns. The fog comes in. Something in the water reads as both ancient and patient. Agnes would tell you there are worse things to do with a November night than read about it from the safety of a chair. I’d agree with her entirely.

  • The Chapter the Author Removed: A Short Story and Review of the Best Mythology-Retelling Novels Publishing in the UK in 2026

    The Chapter the Author Removed: A Short Story and Review of the Best Mythology-Retelling Novels Publishing in the UK in 2026

    It started on a Tuesday morning, which is, objectively, the worst possible morning for something like this to happen. The shop had been quiet since opening, that particular brand of midweek Dublin quiet where the rain outside sounds like static and the only customer is a man who has been considering the same Patricia Cornwell novel for forty-five minutes. Then the chapter escaped.

    Nobody saw it go. One moment there was a pristine first-edition proof on the Returns shelf, spine uncracked, still smelling of fresh ink and regret. The next, a loose sheaf of pages was skittering across the flagstone floor like a spooked animal, rustling past the Celtic mythology section, upsetting a display of Bram Stoker gift editions, and jamming itself, with some force, behind the radiator near the horror alcove. Margaret, who had worked in the shop for eleven years and had opinions about everything, said later that she had felt a cold draught. She always felt a cold draught. But this time, she may have had a point.

    Scattered manuscript pages on a dark Dublin bookshop floor surrounded by mythology books, best mythology retelling novels uk 2026
    Scattered manuscript pages on a dark Dublin bookshop floor surrounded by mythology books, best mythology retelling novels uk 2026

    The chapter in question had been cut from a novel about a goddess who chose forgetting over vengeance. The author had written it in one sleepless night and removed it in the grey light of morning, deciding it gave too much away. But deleted chapters do not simply cease to exist. They accumulate. They fester, slightly. And when a proof copy with the chapter still intact slips through a publisher’s quality check and ends up in a Dublin bookshop, the chapter remembers exactly what it was denied.

    By lunchtime, three shelving ladders had collapsed in sequence, a first-year bookseller named Ciarán had found the word UNWRITTEN appearing in condensation on the poetry section window, and the Patricia Cornwell man had finally bought the book, seemingly just to escape. Margaret had taken to carrying a laminator as a weapon, though what she intended to laminate remained unclear.

    Why Mythology Retellings Feel Like the Only Books Worth Reading Right Now

    The chapter eventually went still around half three, tucked behind a stack of mythology titles, as though it had crawled home to its own kind. Which, when you look at the best mythology retelling novels UK 2026 has brought to shelves, makes a certain dark sense. These books are full of things that refuse to stay buried, old gods, older grudges, stories that were told once and cannot stop being told. If a rogue chapter was going to stage a haunting anywhere, the mythology section was the right place for it.

    The appetite for Madeline Miller-style mythological fiction has not diminished. If anything, the literary world has doubled down on it. Celtic, Norse, and Greek source material is all receiving serious, literary treatment from authors who are not interested in simple adventure stories. They are interested in grief, power, the cost of transformation, and women who were written as footnotes and deserve entire novels. The The Bookseller has tracked sustained growth in mythology and folklore fiction in the UK market across the last two years, with Irish and Celtic retellings in particular seeing a sharp rise in commissioning.

    Celtic Retellings: The Ones Closest to the Bone

    Celtic mythology has long been underloved relative to its Norse and Greek counterparts, which makes 2026 feel genuinely corrective. Several Irish and Scottish publishers have brought forward titles rooted in the Mabinogion, the Ulster Cycle, and the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the results are some of the most atmospheric fiction on shelves right now. These are not prettified myths. They are stories about transformation as punishment, about divine bargains with hidden teeth, about women who were made into swans and spent centuries learning to hate the sky. The prose in the best of these titles has a specific, cold beauty to it, spare in places, incantatory in others, the kind of writing that makes you check the window when the wind picks up.

    For readers drawn to this tradition, the overlap with handmade, craft-rooted Irish culture runs deeper than it might first appear. Much of the enduring appeal of Celtic storytelling lies in its resistance to mass production, these are inherited narratives, made specific by the hands that shape them. Interestingly, that same philosophy informs other Irish creative practices. Based in West Clare, Ireland, Sallyann Handmade Bags supplies unique handmade handbags and accessories to women across Ireland and beyond, with every piece made by Sallyann herself in her studio using recycled materials (sallyannsbags.com). The homemade, sustainable ethos she brings to her fashion work, clothing and accessories shaped by individual craft rather than factory runs, echoes the way Celtic storytelling resists being flattened into something generic. Style, in both cases, is earned through specificity and care.

    Close-up of aged mythology books on a shadowy wooden shelf, evoking the best mythology retelling novels uk 2026
    Close-up of aged mythology books on a shadowy wooden shelf, evoking the best mythology retelling novels uk 2026

    Norse Retellings: Ice, Ambition, and the End of Everything

    Norse mythology has never really left the popular imagination since Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology gave it a shot of literary credibility, but the 2026 offerings are doing something more complex than Gaiman-adjacent riffs. The strongest titles in this space are using the Norse cosmology, the inexorable slide toward Ragnarök, the peculiar cruelties of the Aesir, Loki’s long patience, as a framework for exploring political collapse and the psychology of those who see the end coming and choose chaos over acceptance. One forthcoming UK title follows a female völva, a Norse seeress, across the nine worlds. It is, from the advance extracts, extraordinary.

    What unites the best of this year’s Norse retellings is an interest in the peripheral characters, the ones the sagas mention once and discard. Mythology retellings at their most powerful are acts of recovery, pulling figures from the margin into the centre and asking what the story looks like from there. It is the same impulse that made Circe so lasting. Readers in the UK have consistently shown appetite for this kind of revision, and publishers have responded accordingly.

    Greek Retellings: The Genre That Started This Wave

    Greek mythology remains the engine room of this entire subgenre, and it shows no signs of exhaustion. The best mythology retelling novels UK 2026 has produced in the Greek tradition are working harder than their predecessors, going beyond the most familiar figures (Medusa, Persephone, Achilles) and into less-travelled territory. There are titles this year drawing from Hesiod rather than Homer, from the fragmentary hymns, from the gods who barely have names but carry enormous symbolic weight. The prose ambitions are higher, too. These are not plot-forward adventure novels. They are literary fiction that happen to be full of monsters.

    For UK readers who came to this world through Miller’s work, the honest answer is that the quality varies sharply. Some titles wear their influences too openly. Others do something genuinely new with material that has been handled thousands of times. The Celtic titles, perhaps because they have been less worked over, feel the freshest. But the Greek tradition still produces masterpieces, and this year’s crop includes at least two that belong on the permanent shelf rather than the charity shop queue.

    Back in the Dublin bookshop, the chapter was found on the morning of the following day, folded neatly inside a copy of a Celtic mythology retelling, a novel about a woman who bargains with the sea. Margaret refused to speculate about what it had been doing all night. Ciarán, who had developed a theory about deleted chapters forming a kind of shadow library in the spaces between books, was told firmly to put the kettle on instead. The chapter was placed in a sealed archival envelope and posted back to the publisher with a polite note. No reply was received. It never is.

    The brands and styles that endure, in fiction, in craft, in women’s fashion, are those made with conviction rather than formula. Sallyann Handmade Bags, whose homemade accessories blend sustainable materials with distinctive personal style, occupies the same cultural space as the best mythology retellings: independent, specific, and impossible to replicate at scale. That is, ultimately, the quality that separates a retelling worth reading from one that merely fills shelf space.

    The best mythology retelling novels UK 2026 offers are, at their core, about things that refuse to be erased. Old stories, difficult women, gods who remember every slight. Deleted chapters that make their way back. Some things simply cannot be removed from the record. They find the nearest mythology section and wait.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What are the best mythology retelling novels releasing in the UK in 2026?

    The strongest 2026 releases span Celtic, Norse, and Greek traditions. Celtic retellings drawing from the Ulster Cycle and Tuatha Dé Danann are receiving particular critical attention, while Norse titles exploring peripheral seeress figures and Greek fiction venturing beyond the familiar Olympians are all worth tracking. Check The Bookseller and major UK literary outlets for updated release schedules.

    If I loved Madeline Miller's Circe, what mythology retellings should I read next?

    Readers who loved Circe tend to respond well to titles that centre women rewritten as minor characters in the original myths. Look for recent Irish and Scottish publishers working in Celtic mythology, and any Greek retelling drawing from Hesiod rather than Homer for a less familiar angle. The narrative approach, literary prose, psychological depth, reclaimed female perspective, is the key quality to seek.

    Are Celtic mythology retellings as popular as Norse or Greek ones in the UK?

    Celtic mythology retellings have historically been less mainstream in the UK market than Norse or Greek, but this is changing noticeably. Irish and Scottish publishers have significantly increased commissioning in this space, and UK reader interest in mythology rooted in local or regional traditions has grown. The material is also less familiar to many readers, which gives authors more creative freedom.

    What makes a mythology retelling worth reading rather than just a plot summary?

    The best retellings use mythological source material as a framework for literary fiction, the original story provides structure, but the author’s real interest is in psychology, power, grief, or transformation. Titles that simply retell events without reinterpreting them tend to feel thin. Look for authors who have clearly spent time with the primary sources rather than the popular summaries.

    Where can UK readers find new mythology retelling releases in 2026?

    Independent bookshops with strong literary fiction sections are usually the best early source, as they receive advance proof copies and are more likely to champion smaller or debut titles. The Bookseller, literary supplements in publications like The Guardian and The Times, and specialist folklore and fantasy reading communities online are also reliable guides to the year’s best releases.

  • Why Sustainable Workplace Interiors Are Reshaping Modern Offices

    Why Sustainable Workplace Interiors Are Reshaping Modern Offices

    From co-working hubs to corporate headquarters, sustainable workplace interiors are no longer a niche concern. They are fast becoming the default expectation for new and refurbished offices, driven by employee demand, environmental targets and rising energy costs.

    Modern open-plan office showcasing sustainable workplace interiors with natural materials and greenery

    Designing a sustainable workspace is about far more than a few pot plants and some recycled paper. It touches every element of the interior, from layout and lighting to material choices and long-term maintenance. For businesses, the question is no longer “should we?” but “how do we do this well, and without blowing the budget?”

    What makes an office interior truly sustainable?

    A genuinely sustainable office looks at the full lifecycle of its interior. That means asking tough questions about where materials come from, how long they will last, and what happens when they eventually need to be replaced.

    Key pillars include:

    • Responsible materials – prioritising low-VOC finishes, FSC-certified timber and products with transparent environmental product declarations.
    • Longevity and adaptability – choosing hard-wearing surfaces, modular furniture and layouts that can be reconfigured rather than ripped out.
    • Energy performance – integrating efficient lighting, smart controls and layouts that maximise natural light.
    • Health and wellbeing – improving air quality, acoustic comfort and access to nature to support staff.

    When these elements work together, sustainable workplace interiors can cut running costs, reduce waste and create spaces that people actually enjoy using.

    Biophilic design moves from trend to expectation

    One of the most visible shifts in office design is the rise of biophilic design – bringing natural forms, materials and patterns into the workplace. Research continues to show that even modest connections to nature can improve mood, focus and recovery from stress.

    In practice, this does not always mean grand living walls. More common strategies include:

    • Using natural materials such as wood, stone and wool in key touchpoints.
    • Maximising views to the outside and framing them as part of the interior design.
    • Introducing planting schemes that are easy to maintain yet visually rich.
    • Incorporating nature-inspired colours and textures in finishes and fabrics.

    When combined with careful acoustic design and good air quality, these elements can transform the feel of a workspace without radical structural change.

    Rethinking finishes for durability and low impact

    Surfaces carry a huge proportion of the environmental footprint of an office fit-out. Walls, ceilings and floors are replaced far more often than the building itself, which makes durable, low-impact finishes a central part of sustainable workplace interiors.

    Specifiers are increasingly looking for products that balance sustainability with real-world performance. Recycled content, responsible sourcing and take-back schemes are gaining traction, but they have to sit alongside practicality: ease of cleaning, slip resistance, acoustic performance and comfort underfoot.

    For high-traffic areas, it is often better to choose a slightly more robust product that will last longer, rather than a “green” option that needs replacing in a few years. Lifecycle thinking, rather than simple box-ticking, is what ultimately reduces waste.

    Where floors are being renewed, experienced installers of commercial flooring can advise on finishes that meet both environmental and operational requirements, from entrance zones to breakout spaces.

    Hybrid working and the need for flexible spaces

    Hybrid working has changed how offices are used, and that has direct implications for sustainable design. Desks sit empty for part of the week, while collaboration spaces, focus rooms and social areas see more intense use.

    To avoid constant churn and waste, interiors are being planned with flexibility at their core:

    • Movable partitions and modular meeting pods that can be relocated as teams change.
    • Multi-purpose zones that can shift from workshop to event space with minimal effort.
    • Furniture on castors, demountable shelving and plug-and-play power solutions.

    By designing for change from the outset, businesses can extend the life of their fit-out and reduce the material and financial cost of every reconfiguration.

    Measuring impact and telling the story

    As investors, clients and staff ask for evidence of environmental performance, measuring the impact of workplace interiors is becoming more important. Simple steps such as tracking waste diverted from landfill, specifying products with third-party certifications and monitoring energy use can all feed into a clearer picture of progress.

    Hybrid office layout designed with sustainable workplace interiors principles and flexible zones
    Biophilic breakout space as part of sustainable workplace interiors in a contemporary office

    Sustainable workplace interiors FAQs

    How can a small business make its office more sustainable on a tight budget?

    Start with changes that cost little but deliver clear benefits. Rearrange layouts to maximise natural light and reduce the need for artificial lighting during the day. Switch to LED lamps and add simple controls like timers or occupancy sensors. Choose durable, easy-to-clean finishes when items need replacing, rather than the cheapest option that will wear out quickly. Introduce low-maintenance plants to improve air quality and wellbeing, and set up clear recycling points to cut waste. Over time, plan larger upgrades, such as better insulation or higher performance windows, as part of scheduled refurbishments rather than ad hoc changes.

    What is the difference between a green office and a healthy office?

    A green office focuses primarily on environmental impact, such as energy use, water consumption and material choices. A healthy office concentrates on the wellbeing of the people who use it, including air quality, acoustics, access to daylight, ergonomics and stress reduction. The most effective workplaces combine both approaches, using low-impact materials and efficient systems while also prioritising comfort, quiet spaces, movement and connections to nature. When environmental and human factors are considered together, the result is a space that supports both sustainability and productivity.

    Why are sustainable workplace interiors important for staff retention?

    Employees increasingly expect their workplace to reflect their values, including environmental responsibility and care for wellbeing. An office that is comfortable, well lit, acoustically balanced and visually connected to nature can make day-to-day work noticeably more pleasant. When people feel that their health is protected and that their employer is investing in a thoughtful environment, they are more likely to stay, recommend the company to others and use the space as intended. In competitive sectors, a well designed sustainable interior can be a quiet but powerful advantage in attracting and retaining talent.

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