Blood on Her Tongue – Write on the World

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.

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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.

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If you’re looking for a haunting, atmospheric read to carry you through the end of #spooktober, Johanna van Veen’s Blood on Her Tongue offers the perfect blend of gothic unease and creeping dread. Set in the Netherlands in 1887, this novel follows Lucy, whose twin sister Sarah has fallen into a disturbing illness that blurs the line between madness and possession. As Sarah’s behavior becomes more erratic—and more violent—Lucy must decide how far she’ll go to protect her sister, even as something monstrous seems to take hold of her.

*Get your copy of* Blood on Her Tongue from my independent online bookstore today!

The story unfolds in shadow and candlelight, in grand halls filled with whispers and secrets. Van Veen’s prose feels appropriately decadent and claustrophobic, wrapping the reader in the same feverish confusion that grips Lucy. The decaying corpse unearthed on Sarah’s husband’s estate provides more than a physical mystery—it becomes a mirror for the moral rot beneath the surface of polite society, particularly the suffocating gender expectations that hem Lucy and Sarah in.

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