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

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I don’t just mean witch trials, I’m thinking of all the books about, for example, Pat Barker’s book about the siege of Troy, and Natalie Haynes’ retellings.

The Witching Tide: The powerful and gripping debut novel for

We’re all watching an erosion of women’s rights in one form or another and the witch kind of symbolises all of that. The Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books publishes long-form reviews of local fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Martha Hallybread, a midwife, healer, and servant, has lived peacefully for more than four decades in her beloved coastal village of Cleftwater. 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. The women are tortured to extract confessions: deprived of sleep, starved, dehydrated, and led on enforced continuous walks through the night leaving a trail of bloody footprints.And those projects are all engaged with writing women back into the record in all the narrative, depending on whether it’s an actual historical event or mythological work, but that’s what we’re all doing. Such declarations of pained sisterhood, shoehorned in to reflect the sensibilities of our own time, felt forced and didactic. There’s a sense of foreshadowing throughout the story, probably because I already know how witch trials went. MM: Cleftwater is a kind of mash up for various different towns and places along the stretch of the Suffolk and Norfolk coastline, which is for me a very powerful landscape. Martha may as well have had a voice since the telling was significantly stronger than the showing in this novel.

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

Instead, she has worked out a rudimentary type of sign language that allows her to communicate with the people she interacts with, but she struggles to express herself adequately when it comes to deeper concepts. The witchfinder, Silas Makepeace, has been blazing a trail of destruction along the coast, and now has Cleftwater in his sights. There's one I won't mention at all but as far as the other one, boy, did this woman love the word piss. A small draught toyed with the flame of the trivet candle and the strands of hair that hung about her face.Here are my trigger warnings for extreme violence against women and children, religious persecution, extreme gender and disability persecution, scenes of torture, death of a fetus, infanticide, SA, and more; I don't think the author or publisher provided trigger warnings, but these barely scrape the surface.

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer | Waterstones The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer | Waterstones

After brutally shoving Martha to the ground, the thugs drag Prissy, a young kitchen maid, ‘between them like a heifer bound for the slaughterhouse’. Kate Stephenson, the newly-appointed senior publisher at Hachette Aotearoa NZ, will publish simultaneously in New Zealand.One of the lecturers said well, publishers here like first novels to be between 60,000 or 80,000 words, so keep going, hit 60,000, then you’ve got a novel.