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All it takes is one bad apple to spread his evil and poof the whole village is frightened and in an uproar. In the time this book is set, disability can be a death sentence for one of a hundred reasons, and Meyer really shows ... the importance and value of compassion and social responsibility. ... This was my favorite aspect of the book and the primary reason I recommend the read. Such well drawn characters! The powerlessness of the accused women and the hopelessness of their plights is rendered in harrowing, unsparing detail. It would be difficult to read The Witching Tide and not be emotionally affected by the monstrous injustices perpetrated on Martha and the other accused women.
The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer - Books - Hachette The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer - Books - Hachette
The women are tortured to extract confessions: deprived of sleep, starved, dehydrated, and led on enforced continuous walks through the night leaving a trail of bloody footprints. Overall, this story captures the injustice and savagery of witch trials in a compelling prose and the creation of interesting characters. MM: Ah yes, the second book is a kind of a sequel. It’s set around Cleftwater – I’m still writing this book, so I don’t know some of it yet myself – and the idea is to have two or three other women from different periods of history who each discover the poppet and each time they do it, it sets them on a different path or it triggers a chain of events. At the moment it looks like there’ll be a 19th Century character and possibly a woman before Martha, like many centuries before. Possibly she’s the originator of the poppet. I’m still hanging out with her trying to figure that out. CM: What was the publishing journey then for this book? Everything I’ve heard sounds like a writer’s dream. Utterly haunting and entirely riveting; The Witching Tide is an unflinching account of the horrors of witch trials, told in a mesmerizing voice from an extraordinarily talented author. It sent shivers down my spine and brought me to tears.” —Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne
Meyer earned an MA in prose fiction from the University of East Anglia and her work has appeared in a variety of literary publications. She grew up in New Zealand where she worked as a journalist and then fiction editor, working with writers including Booker Prize-winner Keri Hulme. In the UK she was the Museum of London’s publishing director before becoming director of literature at the British Council, promoting the work of British and Commonwealth writers around the world. She lives in Norwich. The doll seemed to cling to her skin. Mam had taught how a left eye was the witching eye, able to see things not readily visible but present nonetheless. She turned the doll to one side and studied it aslant. Light haloed it, put a sheen on the dingy yellow wax, kindling the recollection of its purpose. It would need rousing if she were to use it—make use of its powers. Meyer’s atmospheric debut novel transports readers to a community gripped by fear, paranoia and accusation, vividly conveying a hysteria that threatens to engulf all reason.” — New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
THE WITCHING TIDE | Kirkus Reviews
In desperation, Martha revives a poppet, a wax witching doll that she inherited from her mother, in the hope that it will bring protection. But the poppet's true powers are unknowable, the tide is turning, and time is running out . . . Our newsletter will gently land in your inbox at random intervals, bearing tidings of comfort and joy about new Certainly, in the world today, we’re seeing polarities of views, and we can draw other similarities with the witch hunts, Margaret says. 'The interest in witch trials and the paradigm of the witch has been gathering momentum over the past few years,' she says. Indeed, her book has been placed in the genre of ‘witch lit’. But this category is much more than sinister figures dancing around a cauldron, she says. 'There’s a desire to understand what went on in those witch trials, why women were singled out in the way they were. The story itself was immersive and harrowing, the sheer brutality that people can conduct continues to astound me in stories such as these. Silas Makepiece, inspired by real-life fanatical seventeenth century witch-finder Matthew Hopkins, has arrived in the fictional East Anglian coastal village of Cleftwater to pursue his God-given mission of executing by hanging any woman who shows the slightest evidence of having made a pact with the devil – witches, or the devil’s brides.
The Witching Tide is published by Phoenix. Margaret Meyer will be speaking about her book at Woodbridge Library on Tuesday July 4 at 7.30pm. Information at moreaboutbooks.com It’s easy to empathize with Martha, especially since we get a front seat view to her innermost thoughts. She finds joy in caring for Kit, her employer, who she has raised since she was a baby, and kind of views as her own family. Working as a midwife and healer, she interacts with basically everyone in the village. There’s a sense of foreshadowing throughout the story, probably because I already know how witch trials went. But Martha and her friend deliver a baby with a cleft palate, which was a fatal deformity at that time, and she humanely kills the baby to stop it from suffering. But shortly after this, the witch finder arrives looking for trouble, and won’t stop looking until he finds it. A fraught tale of prejudicial assumptions, ignorance, misogyny, and the horrors they can give rise to.” — Paste Magazine Have you ever read a book and been blown away by how incredibly it was written, and then realized afterwards that it is a debut and been even more impressed? That is exactly what happened to me with this book. Autumn is the perfect time to start reading darker themed books, and especially those pertaining to witches, so this was the right time for this one.
The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer | Hachette UK The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer | Hachette UK
stars for a job well done! In my opinion, all the characters got their fair share of voices and the plot was very interesting!Immersive… The author offers a stirring depiction of the selfishness, revenge, and fear behind the accusations. This evocative narrative is sure to pique readers’ curiosity about the witch trials.” — Publishers Weekly Martha is marginalised by her muteness. She communicates solely by ‘shaping’: hand gestures and signs, understandable to those who know her, but baffling to strangers. Her hands ‘must talk for her’. Italicised text has been substituted for dialogue, so the reader is always aware of what Martha struggles to communicate. There’s also the Justice for Witches campaign in Scotland, which is a social justice/reparative justice movement led by two women who are solicitors. I also think there’s an ongoing fascination with the figure of the witch as a kind of archetype. She’s always been an powerful figure. On the one hand on the margins of society, for whatever reason, but still able to have power over it. So that’s a sometimes fearful but fascinating figure.
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