Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

How the Book Is Structured

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil braids three women's stories across nearly five hundred years.

María

— a copper-haired girl in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Spain, who in 1532 becomes a vampire, kills her maker, and lives the next four centuries under a stolen name: Sabine.

Charlotte "Lottie" Hastings

— a country gentlewoman who in 1827 is hunted, courted, and turned by Sabine in London, and who has spent two centuries running from her.

Alice Moore

— a Scottish exchange student in 2019 Boston, whose one-night stand with a purple-haired stranger called Lottie ends with her waking up dead.

The novel runs around 535 pages and is structured in numbered Volumes (Roman numerals) rather than discrete Parts named after the women. The three timelines are interleaved chapter by chapter through most of the book; Charlotte's full backstory arrives later than the other two, deliberately, so that the reader has already lived with Sabine and Alice before learning the shape of the wound between them. The book's central image — borrowed from a vampire-poem the older characters know — is that to be turned is to be buried in the midnight soil, planted shallow and watered deep, to grow back as a feral rose.

A note on the magic system: vampires in this world are not called vampires on the page. The word the older ones use is feral roses. They can walk in muted daylight but burn in direct sun. Their hearts are the killing point — destroy the heart and they collapse to ash. Grave dirt sickens them and pins them down. Silver wounds. They can read human minds and shield their own from other roses. They can mark territory psychically. They can "promise" things to one another in a way that becomes binding magic — a vow you cannot literally break, even when you desperately want to. And they rot from the inside out across the centuries: the human feelings — empathy, tenderness, mercy — slough away first, leaving only the hunt.

What follows walks the story chronologically across the three women, with the modern Boston frame holding the others.

María — Spain, 1521–1542

Overview

The book's earliest timeline establishes the rules of the world and gives us the woman who will become its monster. As a child in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, María meets a veiled widow gathering herbs at the edge of the village and is marked by her without quite understanding why. As a young woman she engineers her own marriage to a viscount as an escape route, discovers that the marriage is a worse cage than the village, and accepts the widow's offer to be remade. The transformation goes too far, the widow dies, and the girl walks out of the ash wearing her maker's name.

1521

Ten-year-old María, a wild copper-haired child the village treats as a curiosity, watches a veiled widow gather herbs near the church on the pilgrim road. A storm breaks; a townsman drops dead; the widow vanishes. María never forgets her.

1529

Now nineteen, María scouts the men passing through Santo Domingo and selects one — Viscount Andrés de Guzmán Olivares, more than a few years her senior. She lets him believe the courtship is his idea. Her parents are relieved.

The journey to the estate

Andrés reveals himself on the road: he views María as a vessel for a son, and his sexual demands are violent from the first night. María, who has secretly learned the widow's herbcraft, begins using tinctures to prevent pregnancy.

The estate

María bonds with her maid Ysabel, who is Andrés's illegitimate half-sister. María falls quietly in love with her; Ysabel does not seem to feel the same. When Andrés's parents — the count and the cruel countess — arrive, they treat María like a peasant who has married above her station. The countess is openly hostile.

The widow returns

The widow, who now lives in León under the name Sabine, reappears in María's life as an apothecary. María visits her often, drawn to a woman who lives free of any man's control. Andrés grows jealous and forbids the visits. María sneaks out anyway.

The turning

Sabine asks María if she is ready to be free. María says yes. Sabine reveals what she is, bites María's throat, drains her almost to death, and offers her own wrist in exchange. María drinks — and cannot stop. She drains Sabine to ash before either of them understands what is happening.

The fire

Still hungry, María returns to the estate, kills Andrés in his bed, kills the count, and watches the countess fall to her death fleeing the flames as the house burns. Her old life is ash by morning. She rides out under her maker's name. María is dead. Sabine rides east.

Sabine — Wandering Centuries, 1542–1823

Overview

Sabine spends three centuries learning what she is. She finds and loses two vampire families — Hector and Renata in Spain; Matteo and Alessandro in Venice — and each one teaches her a piece of the craft and then breaks. By the time she reaches England in the 1820s she has refined herself into a hunter who savors prolonged pursuit, can read and shield minds, can claim territory, and can no longer feel the human softnesses she once had. She has begun to rot inside, and she knows it.

Seville, 1542

Sabine meets Hector and Renata, older feral roses who name her kind for her and recite the verse that gives the book its title: Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose. They teach her the rules — heart and fire are death, grave dirt is a trap, the sun must be muted — and how to shield her thoughts from other roses. They take her to sea with them, hunting port to port. Renata extracts a promise from Sabine that she will not leave; Sabine discovers the promise is literal.

The church

Hector grows arrogant and starts hunting clergy. He kills a priest, takes his robes, and walks the trio into a parish in disguise. A survivor raises a mob; Hector and Renata are nailed into coffins and burned alive. Sabine escapes through a graveyard, dragged half-immobile by grave dirt, the promise to Renata broken only by Renata's death.

Venice, 1679

Sabine meets Matteo, an ancient who has claimed the entire city psychically, and his mortal lover Alessandro, a painter who has chosen never to be turned. Matteo allows her to stay if she follows his rules; in return he teaches her to mark territory, to hunt in plain sight, and to savor a kill across weeks of pursuit rather than tear into a victim like a starving animal. She comes to love them both, in the cold way she can still love.

Alessandro

Years pass. Alessandro ages and his lungs fail. Matteo begs to turn him; Alessandro refuses. Is it life, he asks, if there is never death to balance it? He dies in his bed. Matteo collapses into a grief Sabine cannot reach.

Giovanni

Months later, Sabine returns to find a new fledgling installed in Alessandro's old studio — a man named Giovanni who looks startlingly like the dead lover. Matteo has turned him to ease the loss. Giovanni is hungry and unstable and goes on a public killing spree that ends with a mob burning him in a piazza. Matteo, hollowed out, sails for the Americas. Sabine moves on.

Across Europe and North Africa

Sabine drifts through cities, refining her hunts. Matteo's lessons take. She learns to fast for weeks, to enthrall a household, to choose her victim out of a season's worth of debutantes and stalk her like a long, slow game. The human feelings keep peeling away. She begins to know it.

London, 1823

Sabine arrives in England and learns the rules of the ton — the season, the marriage market, the way unmarried girls are paraded. She poses as a young Spanish widow and inserts herself into the upper rooms of London society. She is here to hunt.

Charlotte — England, 1827, and After

Overview

Charlotte Hastings is the book's emotional keystone. A bright, fierce country girl whose love for her best friend gets her exiled to London for "polish," she is the perfect quarry for the bored, rotting Sabine. The maker-fledgling bond between them is the longest, sickest love story in the novel, and Charlotte's two centuries of running from it shape almost everything that follows. Her storyline arrives in the back half of the book, after the reader has watched Sabine become what she is and watched Alice be wrecked by what Sabine made.

The countryside

Charlotte grows up on her family's estate beside her best friend Jocelyn Lewis and her older brother James. She and Jocelyn cross from friendship into something more on a long summer afternoon in the fields. James catches them. Jocelyn is married off to James to bury the scandal. Charlotte, ruined for the country, is sent to London to be "polished" by her aunt Amelia Hastings.

The ball, 1827

At Charlotte's first season Sabine — copper-haired, widowed, magnetic, openly free — picks her out of the room. Charlotte, who has just lost the only person she ever loved to her own brother, is undone by the sight of a woman who answers to no one.

The courtship

Sabine cultivates Charlotte across months: lessons, walks, late visits. She tells Charlotte she sees her, that she does not have to marry a man, that there is another road. Charlotte falls in love. Sabine asks her to promise — I will never hurt you — and Charlotte does. Neither of them yet understands what the promise will mean.

The turning

Sabine turns Charlotte. The first months are euphoric — two women, a city at night, no rules. Then Charlotte begins to see what Sabine actually is. The hunts get worse. The cruelty Sabine has spent centuries refining starts to land on people Charlotte cares about. Charlotte realizes she is bonded to a maker who is hollowing out faster than she can keep up with, and she is bound by her vow not to hurt her.

Jack

Charlotte meets a much older feral rose named Jack, who tells her about the rot — that all of them lose the human feelings eventually, that some are further along than others, that his own maker once asked him to end him when the rot got bad enough, and Jack still cannot talk about the night he did it. He cannot help Charlotte kill Sabine, but he gives her the language for what is happening.

Escape and Rome, mid-1800s

Charlotte flees England. After years of hiding she finds a careful love with a woman in Rome named Giada, who teaches her how to feed without killing. Sabine, who has been hunting her the entire time, finds the apartment, cannot enter the threshold uninvited — and meets Giada outside. She snaps Giada's neck and leaves a single red rose on the step. The promise binds Charlotte from chasing her. She runs again.

Boston, 1961

Charlotte reaches Boston and meets a kind feral rose named Ezra, who runs a coffee shop and keeps an ear to the ground for her. He becomes her one constant for the next sixty years. He listens for Sabine's name in the city and hears nothing — but every woman Charlotte loves in those decades disappears, and a red rose marks each grave. Charlotte flees west into isolation.

New York, 1994

Charlotte tries one more time. She rents a small place with a young woman named Penny and lives quietly for four months. On their anniversary she comes home and finds Penny risen as a feral rose — Sabine has turned her "as a gift." Charlotte takes a silver-handled hairbrush off the dresser and ends Penny on the floor of the apartment to spare her what she knows is coming. She makes a new vow to herself: never more than one night, never anyone she could love. She keeps a ledger of names in the back pages of one of Penny's books.

Boston, 2019

Charlotte — now going by Lottie, hair dyed purple — has been keeping that vow for twenty-five years. She picks Alice at a college party for the same reason she picks any girl: a single bright night and out the door before dawn.

Alice — Boston, 2019

Overview

The modern frame is Alice's. A Scottish first-year at Harvard who came across an ocean to escape her sister Catty's suicide and her own anxiety, Alice goes to one party trying to be a different girl for one night and wakes up dead. Her storyline carries the present-day plot: trying to work out who turned her, finding Ezra, finding Lottie, and ultimately being weaponized against the woman who made them both.

Scotland

Alice's mother died when she was small. Her father remarried; her stepmother Eloise gave her a gold pendant on the wedding day with a pinch of her mother's grave dirt inside. Her older sister Catty was the volatile one — the runaway, the dreamer who ran away from home at seventeen, called once from York to refuse to come back, and died in a car crash before she could go any further. Alice has been small inside that loss ever since. The pendant now also carries a pinch of Catty's grave dirt. She still listens to Catty's last voice note like a prayer.

Harvard, 2019

Alice has applied to Harvard partly as an offering to her dead mother. She arrives in Boston anxious, homesick, and determined to be someone new for at least one night. She forces herself out to a party.

The party

A woman with purple curls — who introduces herself as Lottie — picks her out of the room. They hook up in Alice's dorm. In the morning Lottie is gone. So is Alice's heartbeat.

The first day

Alice wakes to a sun that hurts and an emptiness in her chest where breath should be. She thinks she is sick. By the time the hunger arrives she knows she is not. She has no idea what she is.

The hunt for answers

Alice retraces her steps through the city trying to find Lottie. She wanders into a small coffee shop and meets the owner — Ezra. He recognizes what she is at a glance and recognizes who must have made her. He tells her, gently, that Lottie would never have done this. Alice does not believe him. He sedates her to keep her from killing anyone in her hunger and brings Lottie to her.

The truth

Lottie tells Alice the whole story — Maria, Sabine, the centuries, Penny, Giada, the red roses on every grave. She did not turn Alice. Sabine did, after Lottie left the dorm. The pattern is the same as it has been for a hundred and fifty years: anyone Lottie touches, Sabine reaches for. The difference, this time, is that Sabine did not kill Alice. She turned her. Lottie does not know why yet.

The plan

Lottie tells Alice — and this is the lie that drives the rest of the book — that the maker-bond is fresh enough that if Alice kills Sabine in the next few days, the bond will break and Alice will return to life. Lottie cannot kill Sabine herself; the old promise still holds. Alice can. Alice agrees.

The club

Lottie dresses Alice in black, takes her to a club where Sabine is hunting, and tells her to keep her thoughts fixed on Lottie like a song so Sabine cannot read what they're really doing. When Lottie steps away, Alice panics, bites a stranger, and pulls back in horror. Sabine appears from the crowd, snaps the bitten girl's neck, compels Alice, and takes her up to her penthouse.

The Penthouse

The climax sits in a single room. Sabine has put on chainmail under her dress, knowing what's coming. She has poured a glass of blood for Alice — a kindness intended as bait — and tells Alice the truth Lottie won't: this whole thing is Lottie's fault, every dead girl in two centuries is a love letter Sabine has been writing to a fledgling who will not come home. She wants Alice to help her trap Lottie one last time. Alice, knowing the chainmail covers Sabine's heart, plays along.

She poisons the glass of blood by tipping in dirt from her own pendant — her mother's grave dirt, Catty's grave dirt — and offers it. Sabine refuses; she only drinks from the source. Alice excuses herself to the shower. She breaks a piece of slate off the bathroom wall and waits. Sabine joins her in the steam and removes the chainmail. Alice turns in her arms and drives the slate through her heart. The oldest predator in the book smiles as she goes — pleased, almost, that the girl had it in her — and crumbles to ash.

Alice waits in the apartment, hand pressed to her chest, listening for the heartbeat Lottie promised would come back. It does not. The elevator chimes. Lottie steps out with two more wineglasses and a softness in her face Alice has never been allowed to see.

Everything will be okay, Lottie tells her. The worst is over now.

Alice realizes, in a slow cold rush, that she is still dead. The maker-bond was never going to break. Lottie has known the whole time. Lottie has been bringing women into her life and burying them for two hundred years to keep Sabine away from herself; what she did with Alice was the same play she has run since Penny. Lottie was going to kill her. She did the same thing to Penny with a silver hairbrush in a New York apartment in 1994.

Alice lets Lottie drink the poisoned glass. Lottie tastes the grave dirt on the second sip and drops to her knees. Alice takes the silver-handled hairbrush out of her own bag — she has been carrying it since she found it in Lottie's things — and drives it through Lottie's heart. She repeats Lottie's last line back to her as Lottie crumbles: Everything will be okay. The worst is over now.

The Last Walk

Alice leaves the penthouse with the empty pendant warm against her chest. She crosses a lobby she does not remember and walks into the Boston night. The sounds of the city register against the silence inside her ribs. She touches the pendant — her mother is gone, Catty is gone, and she is still here. She replays Catty's voice note. Before it ends, her father calls from Scotland — early morning at home, late night in Boston. She tells him she is walking back from the library. He insists on staying on the line. She lies that everything is fine and listens to him breathe across an ocean.

When the call ends she keeps walking. She paces her steps to where her breath would be if she still had any. She is undead. She is hungry. She is the only one left. The book ends on her decision to keep going.

What the Book Is About

The trio is not a love triangle. It is a chain of harm. Sabine made María into Sabine; Sabine made Charlotte into Lottie; Lottie made Alice into what she is by drawing Sabine's attention to a girl in a dorm. Each generation passed the rot on without meaning to — or meant to, and lied about it. The book's argument is that women who have been denied freedom by their world will tear out their own throats to take it, and that the cost of that taking is paid forward forever, mostly by other women. Maria became Sabine because the only door out of Andrés's house was the widow's. Charlotte became Lottie because Sabine was the only woman in 1827 London who would look at her and say yes. Alice became Alice because Lottie picked her at a party.

The book is also, very deliberately, about queer women being allowed to be the monster. Sabine is not a metaphor for the predatory lesbian; she is the actual one. Lottie is not punished for loving women; she is punished for hiding from a much older woman she loved first. Alice does not get a redemption — she gets a fanged second life and the long road ahead. Schwab has said, in interviews, that the book began as a coming-out story and grew teeth from there.

About the Book

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is V.E. Schwab's first standalone novel since The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020). It was published on June 10, 2025 by Tor Books in the United States and by Tor UK in the United Kingdom, in a hardcover of roughly 535 pages with cover art by Peter Lutjen. The audiobook is narrated by Julia Whelan.

The novel debuted at #1 on the New York Times, USA Today, and Sunday Times bestseller lists, and was the Indie Next List's #1 pick of June 2025. It went on to win the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Readers' Favorite Fantasy and a Libby Book Award for Best Fantasy, and was nominated for the Audie Award for Fantasy. It is a standalone — no sequel has been announced — though Schwab has confirmed in interviews that the book began as a deeply personal coming-out story.

V.E. Schwab (also published as Victoria Schwab) is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, the Shades of Magic trilogy beginning with A Darker Shade of Magic, the Villains series beginning with Vicious, the Cassidy Blake middle-grade series, and the Threads of Power trilogy. She lives between Edinburgh and Nashville.

Content notes for readers: Bury Our Bones contains on-page sexual violence, domestic abuse, suicide of a sibling, addiction-coded vampire feeding, child death (offscreen), graphic violence, and a number of brutal kills of women by women. It is also explicit in places. If any of those are hard reads, go in prepared.