Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch: a Guardian Best Book of 2021 – ‘Riveting’ Margaret Atwood - Hardcover

Galchen, Rivka

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007548737 ISBN 13: 9780007548736

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2021

Synopsis

‘Riveting’ Margaret Atwood

‘I loved this book intensely’ Lauren Groff Guardian

The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances.

The plague is spreading.
The Thirty Years’ War is beginning.
Katharina Kepler is believed to be a witch.

An illiterate widow, Katherina Kepler is known by her neighbours for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favours by being out and about and up in everyone's business.

So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story.

Provocative and entertaining, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch draws on real historical documents to touchingly illuminate a society, and a family, undone by superstition the state, and the mortal convulsions of history. It is a story of our time – of a community implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear.

About this title

About the Author

Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007548737
• ISBN 13: 9780007548736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288