Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, published in 2025, is a hauntingly lyrical and emotionally intricate novel that bridges centuries through the interwoven stories of five women whose lives—and deaths—span from 16th-century Spain to modern-day Massachusetts. Blending historical fiction, gothic horror, and queer romance, Schwab delivers a multigenerational ghost story rooted in longing, identity, and legacy. The novel, while not part of a series, is expansive in scope, following characters across time who are tied together by threads of power, memory, and feminine resilience.

Plot Summary

In a sun-drenched village on the Camino de Santiago, a girl named María lives like kindling awaiting a spark. Her hair burns red against the earth tones of Santo Domingo, a color her mother says invites ruin. Born too wild, too willful, María lives by instinct – climbing rooftops, assigning imaginary sins to pilgrims, dancing on the edge of the life set before her. When a veiled widow arrives with a crate full of bottles and a gaze sharp enough to cut silence, María is drawn as if by spell. The woman speaks like no one in town, hands deep in roots and herbs, answering fear with knowledge, medicine with mystery. The town gossips. María lingers. A man dies. And by dawn, the widow vanishes.

Years pass like a river under ice. María grows into a flame wrapped in skin, her hair defiantly bright, her beauty unordinary. Men watch. Her brother arranges. When the viscount Andrés de Guzmán arrives, she does not resist. She has seen the narrow future waiting in her mother’s hands, in her sister-in-law’s swollen belly. She wants more – and if marriage is the price, she will pay it. The wedding is a spectacle of gold thread and salted meats, wine-soaked prayers and veiled bargains. She leaves as a wife, not knowing she will never return.

But her husband’s estate is a place of shadows. The land is wide, the corridors long, but María finds herself shrinking within them. Andrés is generous in public and cruel in private. Her bruises bloom beneath her dress, her laughter withers in his silence. The housekeeper, Doña Pilar, watches with eyes that see too much, while the maids whisper behind closed doors. In the silence between storms, María hears the earth whisper.

She finds the widow again, or perhaps the widow finds her. Ten years older, no less strange, no less sharp. The woman’s bottles are lined in careful rows, and her touch is colder now, like moonlight on stone. María returns to the woods. She learns the difference between root and rot, between healing and harm. Her hands remember. The whispers in the house shift from gossip to warning.

The viscount takes ill. A wasting sickness that eats from the inside. Some say it is punishment. Some say it is a curse. María feeds him tonics with a steady hand, listens to his delirium, and watches as his hold weakens. She wears widowhood before the bell has tolled.

Across time, another girl walks into a different night. Alice arrives at university with a head full of longing and a heart full of noise. In a house pulsing with music and sweat, she searches for a place to begin. Her past clings like wet fabric – a sister too far, a life too small, a self half-formed. She enters the bathroom to escape and emerges reborn, smudged eyeliner and brave mask in place. She walks into the night pretending to be someone else, and in the moment between beats, she sees her.

The girl on the bed is made of violet and silver, light-drenched and dark-eyed. Lottie. She moves like a dream with weight, like gravity in a dress. She doesn’t flinch when Alice stares. She doesn’t flinch when Alice steps close. Their hands find each other in the crush of dancers. The music drowns the names. The house catches fire – or perhaps just the alarm – and the storm outside bursts open.

They run. They kiss in the rain. Water smears the dye from Lottie’s curls, purple running like ink. Her voice carries the scent of another country. She asks permission with a glance, and Alice says yes with her mouth, her body, her open door.

In a dark dorm room, they undress slowly and all at once. Lottie moves like she’s done this before, like she’s seen it all and still wants to see more. Alice trembles under her touch, her thoughts too loud until they’re not. Everything folds – time, skin, breath. They become the only two people in the world. They don’t sleep. They drift.

Morning threatens but doesn’t arrive. Lottie slips away, quiet as mist. She brushes a lock of hair between her fingers, traces a bruise like a signature, and disappears. Alice wakes alone. Her roommate doesn’t return. The party’s remains are swept into silence. But the echo of that night hums in her bones.

María, too, is alone. Her husband buried with full honors. The estate now hers in name, if not in peace. She walks the halls where he once shouted, where she once bled, and breathes in the quiet. The widow is gone. Her crate of bottles left behind, each labeled in looping script. Some heal. Some harm. María learns the difference. She hosts women now – widows, wives, girls with trembling hands. They arrive sick, afraid, curious. They leave stronger.

Charlotte appears next, in a different time, a different skin. She walks between worlds, between years. Sometimes she is Lottie, with violet curls and pomegranate lips. Sometimes she is memory. Sometimes ghost. She carries their names. María. Alice. Sabine. The ones who bled and burned and kissed in dark corners. She remembers.

Alice cannot forget. She searches for Lottie on campus, in streets, in dreams. But the girl was never on the roster. The photo is gone. The sheets hold no trace. Only Alice’s skin remembers. She leaves notes folded into books. Carries keys without locks. Looks twice at every stranger.

María plants roses along the garden wall. Feral things with soft petals and sharp teeth. She names them after the ones she’s lost. After herself.

Lottie appears again. Not in flesh, but in feeling. In the hush between raindrops. In the curve of a root. In the brush of lips against skin. She is story and shadow. She is memory and more.

Time spirals. Bones buried in midnight soil bloom into roses. Some soft. Some sharp. All red.

Main Characters

• María (D. 1532): A fiery, defiant girl growing up in 16th-century Spain, María is marked by her striking red hair and indomitable spirit. She hungers for more than the small life carved out for her—restless, clever, and bold, she resists the roles prescribed to her. Her relationship with a mysterious widow sets in motion a chain of events that reverberates across centuries.

• Alice (D. 2019): A young Scottish woman beginning her university life in Boston, Alice is uncertain, self-conscious, and striving to become someone new. Through a spontaneous encounter with a magnetic girl named Lottie, she explores her identity and sexuality. Alice’s arc is both intimate and tragic, a portrait of someone on the cusp of transformation who doesn’t get the time she thinks she has.

• Lottie (D. ???): Enigmatic and luminous, Lottie is both a real presence and a spectral one. She appears in different timelines, linking the living to the dead, the past to the present. Her violet curls and golden-brown eyes make her unforgettable, but it’s her timelessness and mystery that hint at a deeper purpose—one that transcends mortality.

• Sabine (D. 1532): A woman of knowledge and hidden strength in María’s timeline, Sabine is both feared and revered. She understands the power of names, of medicine, of the unseen. Her role threads through the others like a whispered secret, and her influence reaches long after her death.

• Charlotte / “Lottie” (D. 1827): A ghost who becomes a recurring, central presence, Lottie links timelines and women through memory, longing, and unresolved desire. She embodies themes of agency, autonomy, and love that defies both gender and time.

Theme

• Legacy and Memory: The novel is deeply preoccupied with how memories endure—and how women’s stories are preserved or erased. Each character carries the weight of the past, whether in the form of familial expectation, cultural judgment, or literal ghosts. This legacy binds them across time.

• Feminine Power and Witchcraft: Schwab weaves together historical suspicion of female independence with modern queer expression, using witchcraft as a motif for both danger and empowerment. The women who are labeled witches—María, Sabine, even Alice metaphorically—are those who refuse to conform.

• Desire and Identity: Queerness pulses through the novel’s emotional core. The characters’ relationships—especially between Alice and Lottie—explore love not just as romance but as recognition. The story leans into the liberating and terrifying experience of being truly seen.

• Death and Transformation: Every chapter is steeped in death—not just literal, but symbolic. The deaths of innocence, of former selves, of illusions. Yet Schwab presents death as a threshold, not an end. It’s through death that many characters begin again, or ripple forward into someone else’s story.

• Time as a Spiral: Rather than treating time linearly, Schwab constructs it as layered and cyclical. Characters live, die, and are reborn in one another’s narratives. Past, present, and future are not separate but fluid, interacting constantly.

Writing Style and Tone

V.E. Schwab’s prose in this novel is lush, poetic, and emotionally immersive. She uses language like incantation, layering images and metaphors to build mood and atmosphere. Her sentences often thrum with internal rhythm—long, lyrical, and breathless—capturing the fevered pulse of youth, desire, and fear. Schwab balances sensual intimacy with visceral dread, pulling readers into a world that feels tactile and haunting.

The tone shifts subtly across time periods—María’s chapters are filled with old-world textures, folk horror, and slow-burning tension, while Alice’s sections are modern, fragmented, and pulsating with the anxieties of youth. Yet a unified tone persists: elegiac, ghostly, and feral. Schwab does not separate the sacred from the profane, the living from the dead, or the romantic from the tragic. Instead, she binds them in a tapestry of yearning and quiet violence, letting her female characters speak in all their rage and tenderness.