Strange landscapes, ghostly encounters and uncanny transformations…
Welcome to Marian’s page.
Her novels include The Swimmers (2021), selected as one of the best ten SF books of 2021 by The Sunday Times, The Golden Key (2020), On the Nature of Magic (2023), and the forthcoming Casting the Ruins. Her short fiction has been collected in Lost Objects (2018), nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and in the forthcoming Out Through The Window, Into The Dark.
For news on forthcoming and published fiction, online and in-person appearances, please subscribe to Marian’s newsletter.
Buy Marian’s fiction in the US/Canada, Australia/New Zealand, and UK/Rest of the world.
Marian is on instagram as @maudmarianw.

OUT NOW!
Helena Walton-Cisneros and Eliza Waltraud are back in a new uncanny adventure:
It’s 1902 and Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for finding answers to the impossible, has started her own detective agency. Two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles in Paris, and Helena and her colleague Eliza decide to investigate. Soon they are hearing whispers of vanishings at Georges Méliès’s secretive Star Films studio, strange lights, and connections to the occult. What is Méliès practising at the studio? And is it connected to the haunting in Versailles? Helena and Eliza will only find answers if they accept that the natural world is much darker, stranger, and dangerous than they could ever have imagined.
“Like the fantastical early cinema at the centre of its plot, On the Nature of Magic occupies a region midway between science and sorcery-and Marian Womack excels at the tricky balancing act, mixing methodical deductive processes with bursts of wild imagination. Highly recommended to all lovers of gaslit crime and the Gothic!” – Tim Major
“An intricate built tale of history, spiritualism, and magic; perfect for fans of Susanna Clarke.” – A.C. Wise
“Marian Womack is fiendishly imaginative. She creates magic.” – Priya Sharma
“With a plot as labyrinthine as the catacombs of Paris, this is a hugely imaginative exploration of what happens when science and magic collide, and an insightful depiction of female companionship and determination.” – Lucie McKnight Hardy
“The intricate plot seamlessly weaves together mystery and fantasy” – A.J. Elwood
OUT NOW: US/Canada | UK/Rest of the World | Australia/New Zealand
Uncanny secrets abound in the Norfolk Fens… Read The Golden Key, Helena and Eliza’s first adventure:
1901. Queen Victoria is dead, and England heaves with the uncanny. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms. Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for her ability to find the lost and the displaced, is hired by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old enigma: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens.
Eliza Waltraud is solving a vanishing of her own, that of Eunice Foote from the science books, after being the first person to theorise about the warming of the atmosphere due to poisonous gases in her writings. Is the disappearance of the tern connected with a pollution problem, or is something darker afoot?
“A smart, haunting novel that stuns the reader with its elegance and beauty but refuses to leave their mind after reading.” – Jonathan Thornton, The Fantasy Hive
“Precise and eerie. Readers willing to wade through Womack’s murky, off-kilter world will be rewarded with moments of disquieting beauty.” – Publishers Weekly
BUY NOW: US/Canada | UK/Rest of the World
