'Blakemore brings both beautifully crafted sentences and a thorough understanding of Hopkins’ theology to her fascinating novel. Dangerous rumors of covens, pacts, and bodily wants have begun to hang over women like Rebecca-and the future is as frightening as it is thrilling.īrimming with contemporary energy and resonance, The Manningtree Witches plunges its readers into the fever and menace of the English witch trials, where suspicion, mistrust, and betrayal run amok as a nation's arrogant male institutions start to realize that the very people they've suppressed for so long may be about to rise up and claim their freedom.Ī Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year A mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, Matthew Hopkins takes over the Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about what the women on the margins of this diminished community are up to. But then a newcomer, who identifies himself as the Witchfinder General, arrives. Rebecca West, fatherless and husbandless, chafes against the drudgery of her days, livened only occasionally by her infatuation with the handsome young clerk John Edes. And in Manningtree, a town depleted of men since the wars began, the hot terror of damnation burns in the hearts of women left to their own devices. Puritanical fervor has gripped the nation. 'This is an intimate portrait of a clever if unworldly heroine who slides from amused observation of the 'moribund carnival atmosphere' in the household of a 'possessed' child to nervous uncertainty about the part in the proceedings played by her adored tutor to utter despair as a wagon carts her off to prison.' -Alida Becker, The New York Times Book ReviewĮngland, 1643.

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’.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 seventeenth-century witch trials and the young woman tasked with saving them all from themselves. 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.

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.

The manningtree witches book review