Old Bastards
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Author: Aimee MacDonald
£20.00 Original price was: £20.00.£18.00Current price is: £18.00.
The Last Witch on the Knock follows Thomasin, who escapes to the Scottish Highlands seeking a fresh start, only to become entangled with the spirit of Kate McNiven, a woman accused of witchcraft three centuries earlier. As past and present collide, buried truths emerge. For readers of dark literary horror, folklore and Scottish historical fiction.
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Aimée MacDonald’s The Last Witch on the Knock is a fierce, unsettling debut that gives Scotland’s witchcraft history a disturbingly physical presence. Thomasin retreats to the Highlands after leaving a…
Aimée MacDonald’s The Last Witch on the Knock is a fierce, unsettling debut that gives Scotland’s witchcraft history a disturbingly physical presence. Thomasin retreats to the Highlands after leaving a controlling boyfriend, but a wound that refuses to heal begins binding her to Kate McNiven, a servant condemned as a witch three centuries earlier after resisting the laird who abuses her.
I loved how MacDonald connects these women without pretending their experiences are identical. Kate’s rage, Thomasin’s numbness and the hostile landscape gradually bleed into one another, creating a story where possession becomes both horror and a desperate refusal to remain powerless.
Visceral, strange and beautifully written, this is not a comforting tale of wise women and folklore. It is angry historical horror about male violence, inherited trauma and what happens when the women expected to endure quietly finally refuse.
As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.
In need of a fresh start, Thomasin leaves her toxic boyfriend, absent father and empty friendships behind and spends the summer in the Scottish Highlands with her eccentric Aunt Agnes and her stern young cousin, Nina. The fields and ragged hills promise distance, but something in the land still thrums with an older harm, a secret that has cursed it for generations.
Three hundred years earlier, Kate McNiven labours in the Big House by Knock hill, wishing for a brighter life far from the lecherous clutches of the Laird. When she refuses to succumb to his advances, she is exiled as a witch, and the punishment is meant to erase her. Instead, it creates a different kind of passage.
Kate finds the escape she has been denied in Thomasin, whose vulnerable body becomes her unwilling host. In the thin place between centuries, a pulsing wound begins to open, and the truth of what happened is finally ready to surface.
Historical Fiction
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Books in Glasgow
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Modern Literary Fiction
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Paper Cup
Karen Campbell
£9.95