Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil Review: Two Different Books

Listen to this one if you read for voice and mood and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue worked on you. Read something else if you need plot pressure, because five hundred pages of gorgeous longing never quite build into momentum. I scored the writing 3.5 and the three-narrator audiobook 4.5. It is two different books depending on what you came for.

The split in how people talk about this book is real, and it is predictable. One kind of reader finishes it and calls it the best thing Schwab has written. Another kind sets it down around page two hundred and feels vaguely guilty about it. The rest of this is about working out which one you are, before you spend eighteen hours or five hundred pages finding out.

What is it actually about?

Three women, three centuries, one thread connecting them.

María is in a Spanish village in 1521, desperate for a life bigger than the one being arranged for her. Charlotte is in London in 1827, being filed down to fit a shape she never chose. Alice is in Boston in 2019, a student whose one-night stand goes very badly wrong.

The braid tightens as it goes, and working out how the three strands touch is one of the real pleasures of reading it. So I am going to stop there. Everything below stays at the level of the jacket copy, and there are no spoilers anywhere on this page.

Tor sells it as the story of three toxic lesbian vampires across nearly five hundred years, which is both accurate and a fair warning about the register. It is a gothic novel about hunger, in every sense that word carries.

Is the writing really that good?

Yes. Sentence for sentence, Schwab is operating at a level almost nobody in commercial fantasy is touching right now.

What she does best is appetite. The ache of wanting more than your century will permit you. The particular loneliness of being the wrong kind of woman in the wrong decade, wanting the wrong person, in a place with no word for it that is not an insult. The way hunger curdles into something that eats you back. Those passages are the best pages in the book and they are not decoration; they are the argument the novel is making.

Here is where I landed differently. The prose is doing work the plot should be doing.

After the third or fourth gorgeously rendered passage about longing, I noticed I could not have told you what any of these women wanted in the next chapter. Only what they wanted in general, forever. The historical sections in particular start to rhyme rather than build, and the difference matters over five hundred pages: rhyming is a mood, building is a reason to keep turning. I kept admiring it and I kept setting it down, which for a book about insatiable hunger is a slightly damning thing to report.

That is a 3.5 from me. It is half a point below the last book I scored on this site, and I want the number to mean something rather than read as a shrug. The craft is genuinely high. The pull is not.

Is the audiobook worth eighteen hours?

This is where the book got better for me, and it is why the format call goes the way it does.

The audiobook is 18 hours 26 minutes, unabridged, from Macmillan Audio, and it uses three narrators rather than one. Julia Whelan reads Sabine, Katie Leung reads Alice, and Marisa Calin reads Lottie. Each woman gets her own voice, which is a structural decision as much as a casting one.

The three voices are the best thing about this edition. I scored the narration 4.5, and that is the first time on this site that the narration has come in above the writing. Take that seriously, because the two scores exist precisely so you can see which half you would be paying for. Here, you would be paying for the performances.

If you want to know what you are getting before you spend a credit, the three have real records behind them. Julia Whelan won the Audie for Best Female Narrator in 2019 for Educated and received AudioFile's Golden Voice award the following year. Marisa Calin has a string of AudioFile Earphones wins, including two Garth Nix recordings. Katie Leung comes to this from screen rather than from audiobooks, and most listeners will know her as Cho Chang in the Harry Potter films.

One honest note about wording. Tor markets it as read by a full cast, and I understand why, but what you are getting is three narrators sharing a novel, not an audio drama. No additional actors are credited, and no music or sound design is either. If you were hoping for something closer to a radio play, adjust the expectation now rather than at the first chapter.

Should you read it or listen to it?

Listen, with one thing you should know before you decide.

The audio has a real advantage that the page does not. In print, the book tells you which strand you are in with a chapter heading that names a place and a year. In audio, the narrator changes, and a change of voice registers faster than a line of type. On a book that moves between three women across five centuries, that is not a small thing.

The complication is an edition one. The trade paperback that came out in August 2026 adds a new short story, and the current audiobook listing does not include or advertise it. The paperback contains material that is not documented in the audio edition. If completeness matters to you more than performance does, that alone is a reason to buy the book in print.

So: listen for the experience, and know that you are leaving something on the table. If that bothers you, the answer is not to skip the audiobook. It is to listen, and pick up the paperback later if the book earns a reread from you. Plenty of people will find it does.

What should you know before you start?

This is adult fiction and it is not a closed-door book. There is sexual content on the page. It also contains sexual assault, including sexual violence within a marriage.

I am naming that plainly because the most common question asked about this novel is some version of how explicit it is, and the honest answer resists a tidy label. Sources disagree about where it sits on any heat scale, so I am not going to hand you a number that would only sound more precise than it is.

Beyond that, the topics a reader might want flagged: blood and blood-drinking; murder, violence, gore and body horror; physical, emotional and domestic abuse; coercive control, manipulation and stalking; grief; misogyny and homophobic hostility; panic and anxiety; references to suicide and self-harm; alcohol and substance use; and some material involving children being harmed.

Those are topics, not scenes, and I have deliberately not told you where any of them fall in the story. Neither Tor nor the author publishes an official content note for this book, so any list you find, including this one, is somebody's reading rather than a publisher's label.

Queerness is not on that list and will not be. This is a sapphic novel, that is the premise, and for a lot of readers it is the reason to pick it up rather than something to be warned about.

Is it like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue?

This is the comparison almost everybody reaches for, and it is useful as long as you know what it does and does not tell you.

The two books are not connected in plot. Schwab has said they share a loose creative landscape, which is a long way from a shared universe, and neither is required reading for the other. You can start here and lose nothing.

Where the comparison earns its keep is temperament. Both books are built on wanting something across a span of time that no ordinary life covers. Both are more interested in the texture of a life than in the mechanics of a plot. If Addie held you, the machinery here will hold you too.

Where it misleads is tone. Addie is wistful. This one has teeth. It is darker, more physical, less interested in being liked, and the hunger in it is not a metaphor you can keep at arm's length. Readers who wanted more edge from Addie tend to be happier here. Readers who found Addie slow will find this slower, because it is longer and it has three timelines to keep warm instead of one.

Is it a romance, and is it scary?

Neither, quite, and if you go in expecting either you will be annoyed with a book that has done nothing wrong.

There are relationships in it and they matter, but the engine is appetite rather than courtship, and the emotional payoffs are not the ones a romance promises. Tor files it as fantasy and that is the right shelf.

On the horror question: it is gothic rather than frightening. The dread is atmospheric and it accumulates. There is real violence and real gore, and none of it is played for jump scares. If you avoid horror because you do not want to be startled, you are probably fine. If you avoid it because you do not want to sit with bleak material for a long stretch, take that seriously here.

Who will love this, and who should skip it?

You will probably land closer to five stars than to my three and a half if you read for voice and mood, if The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue worked on you, or if the phrase toxic lesbian vampire novel made you sit up rather than sigh. If that is you, discount my pacing complaint accordingly. You are the reader this book was built for, and the thing I found slow is the thing you will call immersive.

Skip it if you need plot pressure. Skip it if you found Addie static and gave up. Skip it if slow character drama loses you no matter how well the sentences are turned, because the sentences here are turned about as well as they get and they still did not carry me.

And if you are somewhere in the middle, the audiobook is the lower-risk way in. Eighteen hours of very good performances is an easier commitment to abandon than a hardcover you paid full price for.

Common questions

Is Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil a standalone? Yes. Schwab called it a standalone in a letter to librarians in February 2025, and no sequel has been announced. She has said it shares a loose creative landscape with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, but neither book is required reading for the other.

Who narrates the audiobook? Julia Whelan, Katie Leung and Marisa Calin, each taking one of the three women: Whelan reads Sabine, Leung reads Alice, and Calin reads Lottie. The recording runs 18 hours 26 minutes and is unabridged.

Is there more than one English recording? No. There is one North American production and a UK retail edition with the same three performers, listed two minutes apart. That is a regional difference, not a second recording, so you do not have the problem some titles have where two versions differ by hours.

Did it win anything? It won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Readers' Favorite Fantasy, announced in December 2025. The audiobook was a finalist for the 2026 Audie Award in the Fantasy category, announced in January 2026. It did not win that one.

There are a lot of special editions. Do any of them change the book? Not the novel itself. The subscription-box and retailer editions from Illumicrate, OwlCrate, FairyLoot and The Bookish Box are physical redesigns, and several add a bound-in letter from the author, which is front matter rather than new story. The signed first printing was signed, not rewritten. The one edition that genuinely adds fiction is the 2026 trade paperback, and what it adds is the new short story.

How long is it? The hardcover is 544 pages and the 2026 trade paperback is 576. The audiobook is 18 hours 26 minutes. Do not convert one to the other; the paperback is longer partly because it adds a new short story.

Where I come out

I liked this book and I did not love it, and I suspect that sentence would be reversed if I were a slightly different reader. That is unusual enough to be worth saying out loud. Most books are better or worse than you expected. This one is more or less exactly what you already are.

If you want prose that makes you stop and read a line twice, it is here in quantity. If you want a story that pulls, it is thinner on the ground than five hundred pages needs. Go in knowing which of those you came for, put the three narrators in your ears, and you will have a good time with it.