The Witches

Stacy Schiff's The Witches deals with a horror we assume we know, but don't: the moral panic that tore apart the towns of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Adolescent girls, denouncing their neighbours, began a fashion for denunciation; it resulted in nineteen hangings, in torture, in the fracture of families and communities, and in the spectacle of a seven-year-old kept in miniature manacles. Was it like The Crucible? No, it was worse. Arthur Miller used the Salem story as a metaphor for the McCarthy era's paranoia. But using the past as stand-in for the present often sells it short, and gives its complexities permission to elude us. Context is everything, and Schiff defines it; she interrogates her sources, makes every detail count, and her style is intriguing - sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian. -- Hilary Mantel * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * A riveting and chilling account of the frightening events that took place in 1692 in a small town in Massachusetts when an oppressive, claustrophobic community turned upon itself, superstition fusing with score-settling... Schiff's account of these terrors reads like a nerve-shredding psychological thriller * MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Best of 2015' * Schiff is a biographer with a transcendent empathy and a sharp eye, a profoundly humane writer able to reanimate the dead, reprising their hopes and dreams, pieties and crimes ... The result is electrifying, an original contribution to our understanding of what happened and how. And in the best tradition of fairytales, picking at the subconscious, her story appeals not just because it allows us to spectate on the miseries of an unenlightened age, but because it deals with "unfulfilled wishes and unexpressed anxieties, rippling sexual undercurrents and raw terror" - universal things that we may suppress, yet which define who we are -- Malcolm Gaskill * BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE * [Schiff] has assembled a vast array of data and then crunched it down chronogically, enabling her to tell the story day-by-day. This is an impressive and valuable achievement ... telling the story as it might have been understood by an observer at the time, from the first disturbing outbreaks in the Parris parsonage to the final hangings and the soul-searching that followed them ... this makes her story vivid and disorientating, giving us insight into how the world might look if indeed there were witches abroad in it -- Richard Francis * THE SPECTATOR * Masterfully she has re-created history as an oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller: JK Rowling meets Antony Beevor, Stephen King and Marina Warner... Schiff's writing is to die for; clever and lyrical. Grace and gravitas make a potent brew, and there were places where her language was so good I simply noted "Wow" in the margin. So too her dry wit -- Melanie Reid * THE TIMES * Schiff writes movingly as well as wittily; this is a work of riveting storytelling as well as an authoritative history -- Lara Feigel * THE OBSERVER * [Schiff] paints a vivid, engrossing picture of a squabbling, fearful society in which prevailing superstition fused with score-settling and self-interest -- Jenny McCartney * THE MAIL ON SUNDAY * Schiff's is a feat of historical excavation and also of colourful reconstruction of the defendants, the husbands (never wives) who informed on them, the prosecutors and their grudges and the few rare folk who evaded the hangman's noose. We are given these people's family contexts, their appearances and court dialogue is vividly captured. Much of it is moving -- Arifa Akbar * THE INDEPENDENT * Using feminist theory, ideas about power and representation and the legal issues of the time, Schiff draws some interesting parallels with modern times * CATHOLIC HERALD * Masterly... Alternately absurd and heart-rending * ECONOMIST * Schiff sets scenes brilliantly,

Stacy Schiff is one of America's most acclaimed and popular historians. She is the author of VRA (MRS VLADIMIR NABOKOV), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; SAINT-EXUPRY, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A GREAT IMPROVISATION: FRANKLIN, FRANCE, AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICA, winner of the George Washington Book Prize; and CLEOPATRA: A LIFE. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. www.stacyschiff.com | @stacyschiff | facebook.com/stacyschiff