Lean, vivid, and relentlessly absorbing…
Set in 17th-century Scotland, Brooke’s stark, unsparing story traces how fear, grief, and institutional authority can transform care into a punishable offense. In Fife, 1649, sisters Isla and Elspeth Blackwood serve their community as herbal healers, their work trusted until illness, childbirth, and death seed suspicion. As rumor sharpens into accusation and a notorious witch pricker arrives to legitimize fear, the sisters are declared witches and forced beyond every limit of endurance by the watching town.
Brooke’s rendering of period detail is precise and unshowy, grounding the narrative in social hierarchy, medical practice, and the particular precarity of women whose knowledge exists outside sanctioned power. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its restraint. Violence is never sensationalized. It emerges as the natural consequence of collective panic and moral failure. When the sisters’ healing knowledge is finally repurposed as a weapon, the ending arrives with an unsettling sense of inevitability. Brooke offers no easy judgments, only a sobering portrait of collective cruelty and the ease with which righteousness becomes justification. A stunner.
Pub date September 16, 2026
ISBN 979-8993477701
Print length 292 pages
Price $15.99 (USD) Paperback, $6.99 Kindle edition
