The Leto bundle - Marina Warner

The first novel in eight years from the acclaimed author of The Lost Father and No Go the Bogeyman . Full of mystery and myth, sensual writing and surprise, Marina Warner’s compelling new novel keeps the reader guessing right up until the end.

Room XIX of the Museum of Albion doesn’t usually receive many visitors. But one day a crowd of dispossessed, immigrants and homeless gather, demanding to see a mummy that has been removed. As political pressure builds, the curator unpacks the exhibit and has to explain its bizarre contents, and herself, to the passionate young man who has adopted the mummy as a figurehead. The tomb contains a miscellany of objects and documents, some written on the mummy bands themselves, others in a ship’s diary, which tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto.

As Leto moves gradually westwards across the map from her childhood home, she slips through time. On the run in a far-off era of civil strife, she gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, stows away on a ship, and works as a chambermaid in a war-torn city. In a bombing attack she saves her daughter, but loses her son.

As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages, to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe, and ultimately to the present day, Leto reappears, with her daughter, in different guises. Eventually, in modern day ‘Albion’, Leto becomes a servant in the household of a rock singer; there, she begins to search for her son.