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

Product Information

Of course, we do know this history bears repeating, lest we forget what was shamefully done to innocent women. There are benefits to exploring the unfair accusations and the horrific results of an unjust witch hunt. But if it’s going to be redone, it needs to actually be interesting and take on something new beyond a mute character who never truly feels mute. For readers of Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel, an immersive literary debut inspired by historical events—a deadly witch hunt in 17th-century England—that claimed many innocent lives. A spellbinding historical debut which tells the story of a silent midwife hiding a secret and a witch-hunt that tears a community apart. Perfect for fans of Stacey Halls, Maggie O'Farrell, Jessie Burton, and Hannah Kent. MM: Because of the fame of the course, agents come and look at who’s graduating. The course produces a kind of booklet, they call it the dossier, which is a short biography of the students who are going to graduate that year, plus a 2,000-word sample of your work. So that had gone out to all the agents. So that’s how I got my agent, Peter Strauss⸺

The witch won’t die’: Margaret Meyer on writing The Witching ‘The witch won’t die’: Margaret Meyer on writing The Witching

Martha is marginalised by her muteness. She communicates solely by ‘shaping’: hand gestures and signs, understandable to those who know her, but baffling to strangers. Her hands ‘must talk for her’. Italicised text has been substituted for dialogue, so the reader is always aware of what Martha struggles to communicate. MM: There’s a museum in Cornwall, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic: they have lots in their collection. I looked at pictures of them too and you’re right, they’ve often connected with witches: they’re mentioned in records and in other [historic fiction] books as well. For example in The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave there’s a scene where they search the accused woman’s house, and they find little poppets, which in her case are just basically ornaments on her mantelpiece. But they’re like “You’ve got poppets, that means you’re a witch.” And that was the common situation. The Witching Tide takes place in the 1600's in a small village where chaos comes to reign. The story centers around Martha Hallybread, who is known for her caregiving to the residents with her herbs and helping welcome new babies into this world. She is also house servant to Kit and his wife Agnes. Martha has known Kit since birth and feels very maternal toward him, considering him the son she never had. Agnes is getting ready to give birth herself so it should be a happy time in the household.

Need Help?

Kate Stephenson, the newly-appointed senior publisher at Hachette Aotearoa NZ, will publish simultaneously in New Zealand. North American rights have sold to Nan Graham and Kara Watson at Scribner US. The book has sold in five translation territories. There was a heated seven-way bidding war in the UK for Margaret Meyer’s first novel The Witching Tide, which is a transportive reading experience set in the dark heart of the witch trials that took place in East Anglia, 1645-47. I zoomed Margaret to talk to her from her home in Norwich, England on the cusp of the book’s release in New Zealand (where Meyer grew up). Martha Hallybread is a healer, specializing in midwifery. She is also mute and values her role as servant for the man she raised and his new wife. She is often called upon to assist in births but the folks in her village are a superstitious lot and it doesn’t take much to turn their minds. When a witch-finder comes to their village, Martha is forced to take on a role that will betray other women she cares about. Loyalty, friendship, love – it’s all here and how it plays out is a harrowing, heart-wrenching story. Utterly haunting and entirely riveting; The Witching Tide is an unflinching account of the horrors of witch trials, told in a mesmerizing voice from an extraordinarily talented author. It sent shivers down my spine and brought me to tears.” —Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne

The Witching Tide: The powerful and gripping debut novel for

A timely, visceral novel that hurls the reader into a community riddled with suspicion, fear and recrimination. Margaret Meyer expertly creates an atmosphere of creeping dread, where no one is safe, and women find themselves punished for their own misfortunes and those of their erstwhile friends and neighbors.” — Natalie Haynes, author of A Thousand Ships Martha, a mute midwife, finds herself caught up in the rounding up of women from her town that are supposedly witches. If a woman didn’t want the advances made to her by a man, he could spread around lies and say she is a witch. If a baby died of complications from birth, they could say the midwife is a witch. CM: What was the publishing journey then for this book? Everything I’ve heard sounds like a writer’s dream. East Anglia, 1645. Martha Hallybread, a midwife, healer, and servant, has lived peacefully for more than four decades in her beloved seaside village of Cleftwater. Having lost her voice as a child, Martha has not spoken a word in years.Have you ever read a book and been blown away by how incredibly it was written, and then realized afterwards that it is a debut and been even more impressed? That is exactly what happened to me with this book. Autumn is the perfect time to start reading darker themed books, and especially those pertaining to witches, so this was the right time for this one. The accused women deny their charges, but no one believes them. The witch trials are a sham. The scales of justice are already tipped, the women indicted on manufactured evidence and false charges by Makepeace, the searchers and vindictive neighbours looking for plausible explanations for illness, death and misfortune. As she had feared, Martha, too, is eventually arrested. The other thing from perhaps a more feminist perspective is that the witch has always represented an affront to patriarchy. The witch won’t die: the archetype just won’t lie down. I think there’s a strong parallel between this figure and what is happening right around the world. We’re all watching an erosion of women’s rights in one form or another and the witch kind of symbolises all of that. She pops up again, in different centuries in different guises. And even at that stage, I was only going to write a novella of 25,000 words, but as I worked away, the word count went steadily up: I hit 25,000 words, and had only scratched the surface. 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. The manuscript ultimately ended up at 90,000 words and by then I had been approached by an agent and the publishing process unfolded from there.