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 * 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 is an impressive and valuable achievement.

has assembled a vast array of data and then crunched it down chronogically, enabling her to tell the story day-by-day. 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 *

The result is electrifying, an original contribution to our understanding of what happened and how. 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. Schiff's account of these terrors reads like a nerve-shredding psychological thriller * MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Best of 2015' * Hilary Mantel * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *Ī 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. You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian. Context is everything, and Schiff defines it she interrogates her sources, makes every detail count, and her style is intriguing - sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. But using the past as stand-in for the present often sells it short, and gives its complexities permission to elude us. Arthur Miller used the Salem story as a metaphor for the McCarthy era's paranoia. Was it like The Crucible? No, it was worse. 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. 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.

Relish by lucy knisley