Author: Rowe Irvin
Publisher: Canongate
Hardback
Burley Fisher Book of the Year 2025
Lu says...
A stirring, folkloric meditation on care and harm, I haven’t been moved so much by a novel — haunting and thrillingly alive, Life Cycle of a Moth explores both the tenderness and ferocity of maternal love, asking what we might find ourselves capable of — and willing to sacrifice — in order to shelter those we hold close to us. Life Cycle of a Moth follows a child without a name, referred to as Daughter, and her mother, or Myma, who live isolated in a cabin in the woods. Outside of the woods, as far as Daughter is aware, there is only ‘rot’. She has everything she needs inside their forest, in Myma, their inventions of games they call ‘this-and-that’, their rituals and their collection of canned puddings which can only be eaten with ceremony. But then a ‘rotter’ – a human-like figure with a torso that gapes from behind like a hollow tree trunk – crosses into their forest.
The subtlety and detail with which Rowe invents the mannerisms of Myma and Daughter – the occult and ritual of their lives – is sublime. Daughter’s feral character is richly imagined, down to the way that her view of the world is built into her grammar. She takes the names of forest fragments that call to her, each name suiting her evolving stages, like a moth that was first a pupae. The power of words to make a person and a world is sensitively explored, and this endeavour is Irvin’s central success.