Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels to the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder—is Erin’s strange behavior a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

This book contains scenes that depict child abuse and the death of a child.

The nights are drawing in and the leaves are turning gold. There’s the bite of winter in the air. Fall is here, so light your favourite candle and curl up with the spookiest book of the year.

C. J. Cooke is already the queen of the Gothic chiller, but The Book of Witching is truly her finest novel yet. Drawing together the stories of two women separated by four centuries, the pages hum with mystery and magic. In the Orkney Islands in 1594, Alison Balfour, accused of witchcraft, faces almost certain death. In modern day Glasgow, Clem—a woman grappling with her own mortality—rushes to her daughter’s hospital bedside. Erin has suffered burns to twenty percent of her body after a fire during a hiking trip to the Orkney Islands. One of her companions is dead and the other is missing, but Erin shows no concern for the fate of her friends. In fact, she no longer answers to Erin at all: she is convinced that her name is Nyx…

Inspired by a real historical witch trial, The Book of Witching is a stunning novel by an author at the peak of her powers. Not only is it a haunting, compelling Gothic novel, it’s also a tender meditation on the power of maternal love. I loved it.