The past yields up its secrets: The Red Mouth, by Sheila Armstrong, reviewed

18 Jul 2026

issue 18 July 2026

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Sheila Armstrong’s strange and beautiful novel has 12 chapters, each named for a month of the year – though not always the same year or even the same decade. The author plunges us into archaeology, history, geology and complex human relationships. Time is fluid here: we might encounter an obscure neolithic weapon or stumble on a beer can left by a thoughtless 21st-century rambler. Occasionally Irish words dance across the page.

The Red Mouth – an beal rua – introduces us to a group of strangers whose lives are linked by an Irish peat bog that yields long-buried evidence of past lives: an antler from an extinct species of deer, or an Iron Age woman, throat slashed, a rope around her neck, body curled into the shape of a question mark. The dark power of the bog itself is at the heart of the story.