Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen: Grief, bog bodies, and the quiet horror of what we carry

Grief doesn’t arrive on a schedule, and it doesn’t leave when it’s inconvenient. In Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen, an adult debut releasing February 17, 2026, that truth sits at the center of a haunting, lyrical novel about loss, memory, and the unsettling ways the past insists on being seen.

Anna is a London-based novelist who can no longer write, eat, or sleep in any meaningful way. Her mother is slipping deeper into dementia, her father is already gone, and Anna herself is reeling from a recent loss so destabilizing it has fractured her sense of self. Still, her literary agent wants pages. Progress. A new book. So when a winter writer’s retreat in rural England offers “space,” Anna takes it—less to finish a novel than to escape her own mind.

The retreat gives her isolation instead of relief. The wetlands surrounding her cottage are bleak and beautiful, and during one of her walks Anna stumbles upon the preserved body of a woman pulled from the bog, thousands of years old and eerily familiar. Archaeologists descend. The dig becomes a spectacle. And Anna becomes obsessed—not just with who this woman was, but with what it means to unearth a body that had once been laid carefully into the earth to rest.

There’s a clear thematic kinship here with Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen: the bog woman as fixation, the sense of something ancient pressing into the present, the quiet dread that hums beneath the prose. But the horror in Our Numbered Bones is different. It isn’t sharp or grotesque. It’s cumulative. It’s the horror of loss layered upon loss—the loss of a spouse, a parent, a child—and the way those absences hollow people out from the inside.

One of the novel’s most compelling questions is also one of its most uncomfortable: how long is a person allowed to fall apart after devastating grief? Anna has a supportive husband. She isn’t alone. And yet she is barely functional. The book doesn’t judge her for this, but it does place her grief alongside her mother’s response to losing Anna’s father, inviting the reader to think about responsibility, resilience, and whether survival sometimes demands movement before readiness. Not all grief looks the same, and Balen is deeply attentive to that fact.

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As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the bog woman has suffered a profound loss of her own, and that recognition opens a fragile path forward for Anna. Healing here isn’t neat or triumphant. It’s tentative. Partial. Human. The past doesn’t offer answers so much as companionship—proof that pain, too, has a lineage.

I also felt an early and persistent unease about the ethics of the excavation itself, a discomfort the novel smartly allows to surface. There’s something unsettling about pulling a body from what should have been its final resting place and preparing it for display. Personally, I find the idea of being preserved for millennia—my face intact, my body labeled and cataloged—far more disturbing than the thought of disappearing back into the earth entirely. Our Numbered Bones doesn’t provide easy conclusions on this point, but it doesn’t look away from the moral cost of turning human remains into artifacts.

Balen’s prose is restrained and precise, deeply rooted in landscape and history, and patient with emotional complexity. Our Numbered Bones is a novel that asks readers to sit with discomfort—of grief, of memory, of what we choose to uncover—and to consider what it really means to move forward without leaving the dead behind.

Have you read it yet—or are you planning to? I’d love to hear how you felt about Anna, the bog woman, and the choices the novel leaves unresolved. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen will be released on February 17, 2026, and is available for pre-order now. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Related Content

• Bog gothic, or “Bogothic”: When bogs seep into literature (CrimeReads)
• The Bog Bodies by Ana Kinsella (Granta)
• Novelist Anna North discusses her newest book Bog Queen (Interlocuter)

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