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

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There’s always been such a curiosity around how murder on such a mass scale, on the grounds of witchcraft, happened. When a witch-finder comes to their village, Martha is forced to take on a role that will betray other women she cares about.

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer | Hachette UK

At the moment it looks like there’ll be a 19th Century character and possibly a woman before Martha, like many centuries before. Witches appear to be very “in” these days, among a certain type of woman – a woman, on paper, not unlike myself; those attempting to learn that being “mad” or “occasionally irrational” or “a bit difficult” could, with the right marketing and a few crystals, be reshaped into a positive. Her loyalty lies with her master Christopher, also known as as Kit, and his pregnant wife Agnes, and her life seems nondescript until the arrival of the witch hunt that's sweeping the country. Then she knew them—Hesketh’s lads from the smithy at the far end of the village, and Herry Gowler from the gaol. Her writing includes essays, flash fiction and short stories, and in 2020 she completed an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

Meyer’s atmospheric debut novel transports readers to a community gripped by fear, paranoia and accusation, vividly conveying a hysteria that threatens to engulf all reason. Sue Reidy is the author of a collection of short stories and three internationally published novels. The Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books publishes long-form reviews of local fiction, nonfiction and poetry. There’s a sense of foreshadowing throughout the story, probably because I already know how witch trials went. Within a day, local women are being captured and detained, and Martha finds herself a silent witness to the hunt.

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

On the one hand on the margins of society, for whatever reason, but still able to have power over it. As usual with this type of historical novel, fact and fiction are blended, and for every witch hunt novel I read, I discover new methods of torture and new prejudices against women. It stank (literally) but the people were, all in all, almost the same as one would find now; good, bad, much uglier. Utterly haunting and entirely riveting; this is an unflinching account of the horrors of witch trials, told in a mesmerising voice from an extraordinarily talented author.The novel opens with mute forty-seven-year-old Martha Hallybread – servant, healer and midwife – cutting medicinal and culinary herbs in her ‘physick’ garden. In desperation, she ‘rouses’ a ‘poppet,’ a wax witching doll that she inherited from her late mother, in the hope that it will bring protection. The poppet seemed to reveal both the ridiculousness of the witch trials – the manipulation of meaning; but also the enduring appeal of possible (and private) magic. I got a job here at the Museum of London, a social history museum, and eventually met a colleague who eventually became my husband. A spellbinding historical debut which tells the story of a silent midwife hiding a secret and a witch-hunt that tears a community apart.