BookBrowse Reviews Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen

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A quiet, devastating study of a woman piecing herself back together in the wake of monumental loss by studying a local archeological dig.

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Anna has suffered every parent's worst nightmare: the stillbirth of her baby. Prior to her loss, Anna had experienced modest success as an author with the release of her debut novel. But now, numbed by grief, she finds herself unable to write the second book that her publisher is expecting. As her deadlines come and go, Anna opts to leave behind the noise of London and the stifling attentiveness of her husband for the solitude of a writer's retreat in rural England, where she hopes to find inspiration from the rugged wetlands. But instead, she finds herself caught up in the discovery of a bog body—the remarkably preserved remains of a woman buried centuries ago.

When a team of archaeologists descends on the area to carry out the delicate task of excavating the body, Anna finds herself gradually opening up to friendship and purpose for the first time since her baby's death. The team, led by a charismatic and empathetic woman named Jen, specializes in recovering and studying the remains of women. Jen has dedicated her career to giving a voice to those who were, more often than not, victims of violence and injustice under a patriarchal society; Jen herself is a survivor of domestic abuse. Anna's writer's block is a literal symptom of her grief, but it is also symbolic of her inability to articulate what she's been through. "The only story tapping its way in my brain is the one I never want to tell," she explains. "The words of it are chattering in their chains. Shut up shut up shut up." Her compulsion to uncover the story of the woman in the bog proves the first step in accepting and sharing her own story, and is the beginning of a long and difficult process of healing.

At the beginning of the book, Anna has not only lost her baby but is also dealing with the strain of her mother's advanced dementia and her regret at not getting to know her better while she had the chance. She is grieving, in a poignant parallel, both someone lost long before their actual death and someone whose life never had the chance to truly begin. "I wonder what thoughts she has lost. I never knew them to start with," she thinks about her mother. "I never thought to ask." When we first meet her, she is fixated on death, constantly fantasizing about the myriad ways she could die in any given scenario, romanticizing her own death and the "comfort" it would bring to escape her grief.

And yet with the discovery of the bog body, Anna becomes pained by the thought of this historical woman's life being erased, leaving her defined solely by death. The thought of her being reduced to a museum display to be ogled by future generations disturbs her: "Delighting in death. Never thinking about the life. I can't bear it." This realization, though subtly handled, also proves to be a pivotal step in Anna's own journey, learning to value the life and opportunities she still has, and refusing to be defined purely by what she has lost.

Katya Balen's prose is assured and visceral. Short, staccato sentences in the book's early chapters reflect Anna's fractured, emotionally stunted state of mind and paint vivid pictures of the harsh landscape that envelops her:

"The cold hits me in the chest. The wind is sharp. Nothing for it to catch on until it finds me. Sliding over the flats and fens and bogs. Relentless. My ears ring and my skin burns. It feels good. Ice and fire."

When someone asks Anna about her debut novel, she describes it as "just stuff about life. Small. Quiet. Character study I suppose. People and the everyday. Not much happens. Unsaid maybe." The same description could apply to Our Numbered Bones. The novel is an understated yet impactful study of grief, exploring how it is at once intensely personal and wholly universal, transcending generations and uniting humanity through our shared desire to live, to love, and to leave behind a legacy worth preserving.

This review first ran in the February 25, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.