The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death, by Helen Marshall
27 Jun 2025The Book
Synopsis:
A young woman is seduced by the glamour of the circus and drawn into a dangerous world of violence, cruelty and revenge. For readers of Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and Helen Oyeyemi's Mr Fox.
A dark fantasy tale infused with mystery and threat from the award-winning author whose work has been described by Paul Tremblay as “intelligent, dark, wildly inventive".
As Sara Sidorova hovers between life and death, she is visited by Amba, the tiger god who will devour creation if he is released from the chains that bind him. Amba gives Sara an extraordinary a glimpse into the future.
Years later, her granddaughter Irenda will grow up in a war-torn country where survival means obedience. When a devastating attack robs her of her parents, she travels to Hrana City. There, her grandmother agrees to teach her the ultimate how to tame death. In the circus, 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 from a multi award-winning author will chill your bones and make your heart ache.
My Review
The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death is a literary fantasy novel, written by Helen Marshall, and published by Titan Books. A smart proposal that plays with the concept of the power of stories, following generations of the same family in a dangerous country inspired by Eastern Europe, combining elements of old folklore with more modern ones such as the propaganda of authoritative regimes, all enveloped in a superb prose.
Strana is again at war; a young widow called Sara Sidorova is running, trying to escape the enemy soldiers. As she's shot, she finds herself in the presence of Amba, the Tiger that once freed will devour the universe, guarded by two entities called the Morning and the Evening Star; Sara will get to see not only her future life but also of her granddaughter Irenda, being able to experience all the pain that is to come, having the choice to not only end her life but also freeing Amba ending with the universe and effectively, preventing what is to happen.
And like with a matrioshka, Marshall continues playing with the concept of stories inside other stories, taking us with Irenda and her life in the circus; a lush and dazzling world that is used as the mask for the totalitarianism that is dominating Strana. The line between performance and reality is totally blurred, and we can see how the own power of spectacle is used as a reinforce for the propaganda needed by the political power; and all this dazzling world contrasts with the bleakness of Hrana City and the own country of Strana, where violence and blood is every day's coin. Irenda's story is one about contrasts, and similarly to with Sara, grief is also at the center of many pivotal moments; and while there's pain, we also have a glimmer of hope.
Marshall blends the old and the modern, the folklore and the religion made out of power, all to create a setting that serves as the scenario where our characters are representing their plays; the narrative style tends to go into a circular style, showing how everything is part of a sempiternal cycle, with many elements that readers will recognise from one moment to other.
The prose borders a bit on the lyrical, and the pacing is relatively calm, however, it engulfs you and doesn't let you stop reading without having one more question to answer.
The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death is, simply, a brilliant book; an excellent literary fantasy proposal which is quite unique in the way it portrays many themes while also taking some bold stylistic choices, all to create a memorable novel. One of my highlights of the year, without a doubt.
The Author/s
Helen Marshall
Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist. After receiving a PhD from the prestigious Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, she spent two years completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death. She is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.
Marshall’s creative writing aims to bring the past into conversation with the present. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, which won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, emerged from her work as a book historian. Rather than taking the long view of history, her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds where “love is as liable to cut as to cradle, childhood is a supernatural minefield, and death is ‘the slow undoing of beautiful things’” (Quill&Quire, starred review). It won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015, and was short-listed for the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. Her third novel The Gold Leaf Executions was released in 2023.
Her debut novel The Migration (2019) argued for the need to remain hopeful, even in the worst circumstances. It was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction books of the year and was recently optioned by Clerkenwell Films. In 2020, it was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and for both the Robert Holdstock Award for best fantasy novel and the August Derleth Award for best horror novel by the British Fantasy Society. It was the second time in the award’s history for a novel to short-listed for both, and the first time by a female writer.