![]() Publishers make digital review copies and audiobooks available for the NetGalley community to discover, request, read, and review. ![]() ![]() We follow the accused women through their long, sapping imprisonment, during which Rebecca feels that she ceases to ‘exist as a person in any sense’. NetGalley helps publishers and authors promote digital review copies to book advocates and industry professionals. Petty grudges are stirred and fingers readily pointed. This book weaves the tales of the witch trails in England. Cattle and horses are variously afflicted, and a young boy stricken by mania. Wolf Hall meets The Favourite in this beguiling debut novel that brilliantly brings to life the residents of a small English town in the grip of the. The book’s most distinctive aspect is its prose, which is both authentically archaic – people eat ‘pottage’ and use words like ‘oaf’ and ‘bidden’ – and sensuously poetic: the opening description of ‘a hill wet with brume of morning, one hawberry bush squalid with browning flowers’ is typical of the book’s muscular lyricism. He starts asking questions and the rumors start and put women like Rebecca at risk. ![]() ![]() At its centre is Rebecca West, a young woman from Manningtree, through whose eyes we see a series of grimly inevitable events unfold: eerie happenings that spread through the town, the arrival of the ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, and the arrest and imprisonment of a horde of women suspected of ‘maleficium’. This debut novel by the poet and translator A K Blakemore, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize earlier this year, is a magnificent fictionalised account of the Essex witch trials of 1645. ![]()
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