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Marrow

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Marrow

By: Samantha Browning Shea
Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
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About this listen

A searing take on femininity and power, Marrow transports listeners to a small island off the coast of Maine, where a coven has done the seemingly impossible.

The day Oona was kicked out of her mother’s coven, she gave up on her dreams of harnessing the witchcraft that was her birthright. Years later, she's carved out an ordinary life with her husband, though she is filled with a longing she can barely name. If she could only become a mother, then—according to island lore—she will come into her magic.

But after years of being unable to carry a pregnancy to term, Oona begins to feel desperate. Without the money to seek medical treatment, she decides she must return to the rugged, windswept island where she was raised—and to her dark, enigmatic mother . . . a witch who gives childless women the chance to become mothers.

Oona returns under the cover of anonymity, hoping for an answer. But, despite a celebrity clientele and a long wait-list, there are dark forces at work on the island, and as her time there grows more harrowing, the truth threatens to come to light. How far will Oona go to access the power her mother commands?

Tender and intense, witchy and wise, and written in prose that glitters and seethes, Marrow is a gripping novel about the complex bonds between mothers and daughters, about what we must believe in order to imagine a future for ourselves, and what we must let go in order to fully live it.

©2025 Samantha Browning Shea (P)2025 Penguin Audio
Genre Fiction Horror Magic Magical Realism Women's Fiction Witchcraft Magic Users

Critic Reviews

"Shea debuts with a spellbinding tale of magic and motherhood centered on 30-something hopeful mother Oona... it has plenty to say about what it means to be a mother and it delivers a shocking twist. This potent concoction gets the job done."—Publishers Weekly

"Marrow is a novel with its own weather, an entrancing and eerie tale of longing, regret, and secrets, with a revelation that continues to haunt me."—Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning

"A probable future mingles with shadows of the past in this tour de force debut by Samantha Browning Shea. Marrow has it all: A breathtaking setting, family secrets, Earth magic, desire. Prepare to be spellbound."—Sarah Addison Allen, New York Times bestselling author of Other Birds

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