Based on my own dissertation work on the topic, it’s clear that the author is deeply conversant in the historiography of English witchcraft as popularized by historians such as Keith Thomas and Lyndal Roper. The novel has rightly won glowing reviews and has provoked a discussion about the relevance of historic witch hunting for today, when women are publicly protesting against the violence they face. We can however imagine that this path was regularly walked by some of the accused women, like Anne Leech who lived at Mistley and her daughter Helen Clark from Manningtree. So I think any kind of local-ish pub that would have been around in the 17th century, you could probably make that case for.

Manningtree is a town and civil parish in the Tendring district of Essex, England, which lies on the River Stour. I did hope the America angle would come back at the end and it did, but not in a way that was satisfactory to me. What surprised you about the story, and how does AK Blakemore structure the book to give a sense of tension, suspense or surprise? I imagine I am lowering a wriggling mouse between her lips by its pink tail, then clamping my hand down over it.A black feather lying in the grass is “glossy and ideal”; a fall of sleet “rarefies into a silk mist”. It’s not hard to imagine this as a place to hide and seek sanctuary from the fear and loathing, accusation and uncertainty happening in the streets. In charges of witchcraft, the exalted words of male intellectuals were branded onto the feminine body. The persecution of “witches” had, prior to the 17th Century, been a constant in the assault on women since the rein of the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine.

Though the early skirmishes of the civil war are far from the Essex coast in 1643, when the novel begins, a profound sense of destabilisation pervades the country: “It is an upside-down time. Here are some questions that you might like to consider or discuss with friends, family and fellow members of the Book Club as you make your way through the book.In The Manningtree Witches, the women’s accusers are Puritans, but across Europe both the Catholic Church and its Inquisition and Protestant nations, countries who were at war with each other, united in their persecution of witches.