Karen Maitland's "The Vanishing Witch"

Ever since Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, I’ve been HOOKED on historical fiction – the more medieval, the better. Characters, for me, cannot be covered in enough sh*t, living in hovels, plagued bysuperstition and a wee bit of pestilence. Sure, there are Philippa Gregory’s various novels (and various other authors), awesomely  describing life at court, the power battles and intrigues. Thoroughly enjoy those! But my favourites are still those novels with a wide range of characters, telling tales of all walks of life of that age. Some friends of mine and I had a dorky little Pillars of the Earth fanclub... and one day one of them told me to read Karen Maitland. It took me a while to take up that recommendation, but I have never regretted it. Maitland is INCREDIBLY readable. You break through the barrier with ease and full on dive into the dark ages... and what makes her so brilliant is that her stories always border on the magical, without ever becoming fully fledged fantasy. The magical element in her books is rather born out of the superstitions of the characters. You become so immersed in that world that you cannot tell anymore what is simple trickery and what is magic, or whether there is magic at all. Much like a medieval person must have felt like, the boundaries between simply not knowing things and actual exposure to magic are blurry. It’s a world with an intriguing but completely different mindset, with different hardships and values, yet entirely relatable as a human experience. Her previous works, such as “Company of Liars” and “The Owl Killers” were absolutely stunning, and “The Vanishing Witch” easily keeps up with them. While I won’t ruin the fun and give the story away, rest assured that nothing in it is as it seems, and it’s often not easy to tell who you can trust. It leaves you feeling vulnerable, tense, thrilled yet enchanted. I absolutely adored it.

Your repressed citizen,

Patty