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The Ruin of All Witches

byMalcolm Gaskill

Life and Death in the New World

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In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall.

The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death.

Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world.

A bona fide historical classic ... Historical writing of the very highest class, impeccably researched and written with supreme imagination and wisdom.

Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

About Malcolm Gaskill

Malcolm Gaskill taught history at British universities for nearly thirty years, where he developed an interest in mentalities, emotions and inner lives. Since leaving academia in 2020 to become a full-time writer, he has spent much of his time thinking about war and memory and different ways of engaging with the past. He is the author of six books, including Hellish Nell and The Ruin of All Witches, a Sunday Times bestseller, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and lives with his family in Cambridge.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241413401
  • Length: 336 pages
  • Price: £8.99
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