The Witching Tide: The powerful and gripping debut novel for readers of Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel

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The author did a fantastic job of showing how religious fear and petty arguments among neighbors turned to wild accusations of witchcraft. Pins, needles, three wood bobbins, an awl, two shallow dishes of beaten brass, and a copper cross that had once been set with chips of blue glass, all but one of them gone. Honestly, I think it’s a book that needed to be written and published now and the story will stick with me for a long time. The world Margaret Meyer conjures in The Witching Tide is elegant and haunting, utterly beguiling and so convincing of time and place.

The Bookseller - London Book Fair - Phoenix swoops in seven

With diamond-cut prose, Meyer makes 17th century witch hunts feel vivid, new, and highly relevant to the current moment. Margaret Meyer: The idea began years ago, I can’t remember precisely but it would have been 2016 or 2017, something like that. Women who were found guilty of being witches were hanged at sites around the county but often their names and burial places were not recorded. Meyer is a formidable storyteller; her sharp descriptive powers offer readers an immersive experience. She talks so movingly about each plant and what its uses and how you combine them together to say, make the placenta come out after the birth, or to make the milk flow, or stop the milk, or treat a fever.This book is a great example of what I love so much about historical fiction: the ability to connect the reader emotionally to events long past that otherwise remain so removed from us. In desperation, Martha revives a poppet, a wax witching doll that she inherited from her mother in the hope that it will bring protection. These pages are flooded with slow, creeping sadness; an ever-hovering sense of inevitability telling us readers things will only get worse.

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer - Aotearoa New Zealand The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer - Aotearoa New Zealand

The story touches upon loyalty and also the betrayal of people that you thought you could trust and rely upon. At first glance, the premise of "The Witching Tide" was intriguing for me as most novels I've read on the topic of witch hunts were focused on Salem, Massachusetts and not any of the earlier movements that happened in other countries. Caught between suspicion and betrayal, Martha must choose whether to protect herself or condemn Prissy and the other women of the village.The ignorance and fear that could be evoked in the simplest of things – a birth mark, a misspoken word, or a bitter vendetta – each leading to something horrific, that of being labeled a witch. The Witching Tide casts a spell that carries readers back to 17th century days of actual witch hunts, when fearmongers spread rumor and false accusations to wield power over women.

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer | Goodreads

Firmly entrenched in real history, The Witching Tide is inevitably an emotional and intensely immersive reading experience, and all set against the collision of superstition and religion, the folklore and intrinsic rural ways of 17th century English life, and the atmospheric tides and moods of the East Anglian coast. With characters refreshingly of their time, rather than straw men parroting the mores of ours, this novel is an immersive tale of the East Anglian witch trials as seen through the eyes of an absorbing protagonist. I was moved and gripped by Martha's plight, captivated by the gleaming details of the prose and horrified at the wider picture they revealed. It’s not an easy book to read, especially the ability to quickly turn on a neighbor, the walking torture of the supposed witches. A spellbinding historical debut which tells the story of a silent midwife hiding a secret and a witch-hunt that tears a community apart.

Martha Hallybread has lived for more than four decades in her beloved coastal village of Cleftwater. The first charm was a tiny, wizened organ, grey-pink and dried to a nut-like hardness: the gallbladder of some field creature—a vole or shrew. The face on the other side was more formed and more frightening, the burnt-in eyes widely staring, the O of its mouth agape, as if it were trying to scream. Martha Hallybread, a midwife, healer, and servant, has lived peacefully for more than four decades in her beloved seaside village of Cleftwater.

The Witching Tide | Book by Margaret Meyer | Official The Witching Tide | Book by Margaret Meyer | Official

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Also, and this is going to sound nitpicky, but I started getting annoyed with some of the words the author chose to use.

the sons, husbands and brothers known to all and now caught up in a flurry of violent arrests, ‘uneasy with their task but fear making them needlessly aggressive.