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The Book of Witching by C. J. Cooke

Gothic fiction

The Book of Witching

by C. J. Cooke

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Quick take

A mysterious hiking accident kicks off this spooky tale of witchcraft, revenge, and a mother’s search for answers.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Multiple_Viewpoints

    Multiple viewpoints

  • Illustrated icon, Nonlinear_Timeline

    Nonlinear timeline

  • Illustrated icon, Puzzle

    Puzzle

  • Illustrated icon, Witchy

    Witchy

Synopsis

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?

Content warning

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

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of The Book of Witching.

The Book of Witching

Chapter One

Fynhallow

Isle of Gunn, Orkney

May 2024

It’s almost sunrise.

A magenta streak across the horizon, a smooth, glittering sea.

The ranger’s dog is barking, a wild, staccato squeal that splits the calm.

She shouts at him now to be quiet, her voice growing louder, her pace quickening as she moves toward him. He’s a springer spaniel, two years old, easily roused. But he’s never barked like this before. As though he’s afraid.

Fynhallow’s sand is soft, silken white, a seam that joins the Isle of Gunn to the North Sea.

The silhouette of the dog noses and whines at a dark shape by the caves that run along the outcrop. It must be a dolphin, she thinks, perhaps a pilot whale. Except there’s no fin, no shape of a tail.

She sees the shape of two legs, and gasps.

The curious odor that she caught earlier registers: something has been burning. The wind was in the wrong direction before, but now she catches notes of flame and meat. The dog paws the ground near the body; she sees the hands are bound together at the end of bent, blackened arms.

Her pulse racing, the ranger reaches for her phone and flicks on the torch, and when the harsh white light falls on a charred grimace she drops the phone to the ground with a shout.

It lands upward, the white glare of the torch falling on the body. It is clear that the person is dead.

And her torchlight picks out another shape farther along the bay. She breaks into a sprint, talking to the dog as he follows her, soothing him.

Somewhere, embers glisten in a nest of twigs like rubies.

She lurches to a stop, just where the tide meets the sand. At her feet is the body of a teenage girl, a Nirvana print visible on her sooty T-shirt, tattoos of mermaids and beer cans on her forearms. Her face is encrusted with blood. The ranger crouches, noticing the dog is licking the girl’s foot and whining.

Oh God, she thinks, fear thumping in her throat. Was this an accident, or murder?

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Why I love it

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.

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