The Book of Witching – The haunting new Orkney-set gothic thriller

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Clem spends her days beside her daughter’s hospital bed in Glasgow, listening to machines and waiting for answers. Erin was pulled from the sands of Fynhallow Bay with burns that should not have been survived and a memory reduced to a single name, Nyx. The sea gives nothing back. Neither does the past Erin was meant to be building, or the violent death of the man she loved.

Four centuries earlier, on Orkney, Alison Balfour waits in a cell, accused of witchcraft. Her fate is already written in fire. What remains uncertain is how she came to be entangled with a dangerous text known as the Book of Witching, and what truths it carries beneath its ink and vellum.

The Book of Witching moves between these women, threading together fear, belief, and the cost of being marked as other. Across storm-lashed islands and modern hospital wards, the novel listens closely to what history buries and what the land remembers. Some secrets surface slowly. Others burn their way free.