Reviews

Marina Warner:

Steven O’Brien has forged a word-music to match the strange, fierce magic tales seething in the great local pot of archipelagic stories. He rightly notices that classical myths and European fairy tales have eclipsed this fabulous source, and in a rich counterpoint of memory, poetic and dramatic retelling, historic comment, and remarkable paintings by Joe Machine, this highly original sequence of fifteen stories reconnects our present to an effaced past of marvellous, unsettling  imagination. Weirdness and glamour and faerie are old words meaning knowledge and enchantment and dazzlement; Britannic Myths reawakens their power.