Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humour, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen's writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time — the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear.

The year is 1619, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch.  An illiterate widow, Katherina 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 Katherina has done herself no favours by being out and about and 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...