A young woman is seduced by the glamour of the circus and drawn into dangerous world of violence, cruelty and revenge…
We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Helen Marshall’s The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death, a dark fantasy infused with mystery available June 10 2025 from Titan Books.
Sara Sidorova lies dying. As she hovers between life and death, she receives a visitation from Amba, the tiger god who will devour creation if he is released from the chains that bind him. Amba gives Sara Sidorova an extraordinary gift: a glimpse into the future.
Years later, her granddaughter Irenda will grow up in a wartorn country where survival means obedience. When a devastating attack robs her of her mother, she travels to Hrana City. There, her grandmother agrees to teach her the ultimate secret: how to tame death. But it won’t be easy…
In the circus that offers her first taste of power, Irenda will have to tame another tiger if she is to survive. Amongst the magicians, the strongmen and the contortionists, she will start down a dangerous road, to carry out a revenge decades in the making… and bring justice into the world for herself and for her family.
Rich with glamour and strangeness, brutality and deceit and the dark magic of the circus, this haunting fable will chill your bones and make your heart ache.
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The Lady, the Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death
The Lady, the Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death
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Helen Marshall is Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and received endorsements from authors such as Kelly Link and Paul Tremblay. Her debut novel The Migration, was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction and fantasy books of the year. She lives in Australia. Find her on Twitter/X @manuscriptgal and on Instagram @hairside.
The girl follows the road past the hidden sunflowers. It was her husband who showed them to her, a field of dry earth that would blossom like cloth-of-gold come the height of summer. Dead now, he must be, though she never saw his body. Her name is Sara Sidorova; she is eighteen years old and a widow already.
Days pass as she searches the wildwood for his remains. She marks the hours as the sun rises in glory, then sets in a blue gloom. Birch and alder line the dusty track that brought her this way. Skeleton trunks. Alder is good for sleeping, she knows. Feliks taught her that. Before they were married, they’d lie beneath an alder as high as a steeple, listening to waxwings and bluethroats. Now she cares only for the shriek of the mourning birds, her guides in this terrible business.
She knows these woods well, all this beautiful, terrible sliver land. Mountains in the west, the impassable spine between this little world and the next. The lakes, the coastland, wild and dark, the plains, then the forest, the killing zone, and beyond it the border. Nothing here is easy. In Strana, her people say: we are small but we will make you bleed. We are the bone that will choke you if you try to swallow us. Her people say: we are invaded but it will cost you to take us.
Strana. Country.
If this thrice-tenth nation had another name once they have forgotten it as they have forgotten so many things.
She stumbles on, her clothes shredding to rags, her feet bloody, her painted nails gone wretched as talons. On the fifth day she discovers a body in the woods—not her husband. This one is too old, over forty. Tawny hair, thinning near the crown. Big shoulders, a big man. The hole in his woolen gymnasterka seems smaller than a thimble. She could dig out the bullet if she wished, but he is only so much meat now.
Still, needs must.
Sara Sidorova takes the dead man’s knife, misshapen from over-sharpening. His boots, which are too large. A week ago Captain Olender asked her to dance. Once she loved dancing. She knows she will never dance in these stolen boots, even as she hacks strips from the dead man’s uniform and stuffs the rags in her toes.
“Juniper, juniper, juniper, my juniper,” she sings as she goes about her work. “Under the green pine, lay me down to sleep.”
Then in the distance—the livid shadows of other approaching: a legion of soldiers. The dead man’s friends? His murderers? They all wear the same jackets, speak the same language, so how could she know? Sara Sidorova vanishes beyond the tree line.
Her grandmother told her a story about the devils in these woods who turn men into smoke. Remembering it, she fits herself between birches bleak as old houses—invisible. She doesn’t know these soldiers but she hates them anyway. She never knew hate before, but now it’s an animal inside her.
Storm clouds gather, drench the earth and then retreat. Afterward, Sara Sidorova trails the legion with nothing but the knife in her hands. She could slit their throats while they slept in the mud if they weren’t so watchful—but they are watchful. And for all the days she has spent learning to hold herself straight, learning never to bend, still she is too weak.
At night, she howls her grief. The soldiers huddle round their campfires, blowing warmth into their hands, pretending it’s the damp that has prickled their skin.
“Listen, do you hear that?” says one. Local accent. He is sixteen, maybe. Younger than her and certainly younger than the others. A stripling with a mop of pale blond hair and a delicate, pointed chin.
“It’s nothing. The wind.”
“Listen, I said! There’s a tiger in these woods. A man-eater. I heard it tore through a camp not far from here. Gorged itself on the captain and ate everything but his heart.”
The boy is canny but all they see is a coward. Perhaps they’ll kill him on their own.
“Something is out there,” he says again.
The old reflex: “What kind of man are you then? Are you afraid?”
Soothsayer, prorok, elf-child. Sara Sidorova doesn’t expect anyone will listen to him.
This time she is wrong. Their commander doubles the guard and no one sleeps that night. In the morning they muck out pits and whittle birch spears to lay inside. One among them knows how to hunt a tiger.
The girl’s knife isn’t sharp enough, her body isn’t light enough. She still leaves too many tracks. She abandons them for a time to hunt for cloudberries and the tender shoots of cornflowers. She chances the mushrooms with their delicate fringed veils and wonders whether she might poison herself. If it would matter. What is she living for then?
The baby kicks. Her name will be Else, if it’s a girl. If it’s a boy she will have to strangle him.
She hushes her hate. Back to the road.
It’s close to dawn when she makes her second mistake.
All around her, the wildwood is alive, first with warblers and rosefinches, then the rest of the noisy lot. Sara Sidorova moves through the undergrowth, letting the birdsong hide her business. But she isn’t as silent as she thinks. Suddenly, a bullet slams into her shoulder. The crack like thunder comes too late in warning.
She falls in a slow spiral. No pain, not yet.
Was this how it happened, husband? she wonders. Is this how they killed you?
Then there’s wet loam beneath her, sweet smelling. She wants to stay, sleep in her pain now death has come. She puts her thumb to the wound. Her blood is coming out in spurts, and, with it, her fury and helplessness.
The soldier boy’s face hovers over her: pointed chin, fey-blue eyes. “I thought you were one of them!”
Sara Sidorova doesn’t believe him. After all, she’s wearing the same jacket he is.
“You’re just a girl,” he says, though she is older than he is. At eighteen strands of bone-white gleam in the tawny thicket of her hair.
“I’m sorry,” he mutters, staring at the knife.
“Go away!”
“If I do, you’ll die. Gangrene or blood sickness. I’ve seen it before. Why are you so dirty? Why are you so thin?”
Scarlet smears across his cheek as he tries to wrestle her up. Her belly is cramping, a deep, bleary pain that tightens and loosens. The child mustn’t come yet. Too soon.
“Leave me alone!” she hisses, for above all, she doesn’t want him to see the bulge beneath the jacket.
“I’ll take you with me.”
Now she is fumbling with the blade. She can’t work her right arm properly but all she needs is a bit of cunning.
“Who are you?” he cries as she stabs out wildly.
She doesn’t tell him she is the circus master’s daughter.
She doesn’t tell him how loved she was in these parts once. The tiger’s wife.
Instead she whispers: “My name is Baba Yaga and I’ll eat you if you stay. I’ll chop up your flesh and grind up your bones. I’ll put a candle in your skull and hang it from my belt as a lantern.” The knife point scrapes his thigh bone and he staggers away in fright. So young. She almost smiles. Dragging his poor limbs like that, leaving a trail of gore. She’ll find him later if she must.
For now, soft needles beneath her and the world going dark. Noises in the forest, the silken swish of something out there moving. Two golden eyes, like two bad moons. The pale curve of teeth.
“Hush now, my love. I’m with you,” says the Tiger.
“It’s you then, is it?” asks Sara Sidorova. She feels as if her spirit has already left her body. “Old man, Grandfather Death. The devil in the wood.”
“It was you who loosed me.”
“I told you to take them and you did. Thank you.” Somewhere else, her breath whistles between her lips in little gasps but she is smiling now.
“The boy was right. This wound will kill you.”
But she isn’t afraid. “I stuck him. Follow his blood and you’ll find a meal big enough to sate your hunger.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I want an ending,” she says.
“Good. Come away with me then,” the beast whispers in her ear.
Sara Sidorova watches as a magnificent, curved claw drags itself through the air, which parts like the stripling’s flesh. Then there is a road—a second road, shimmering black, winding, impossible. That second road becomes a staircase, a great twined chain thrown down to the earth. Inside her the baby moves like a song. Or is it a white bird? Smoke?
Sara Sidorova doesn’t remember standing.
She doesn’t remember setting her feet upon the path, but there, it’s done.
She is walking, then rising upward. She sees the black arc of the heavens, stretched like a widow’s veil above her, the forest beneath now, then all of Strana. She imagines the trembling of small creatures.
“Welcome, princess,” says the Tiger.
Excerpted from The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death © 2024 by Helen Marshall
