A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic . Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx. Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse? "Chilling and beautifully written, The Book of Witching gripped me from the very first sentence: I read it in one sitting. A haunting recreation of a real Scottish witch trial, this is CJ Cooke's finest novel yet." - Emilia Hart , New York Times bestselling author of Weyward “This riveting slow-burn thriller from Cooke ( A Haunting in the Arctic ) connects the sins of the past with the horrors of the present in modern-day Scotland... Cooke does a nimble job of jumping between the present and 16th-century Scotland, providing lush description and snappy dialogue that brings the story to vivid, brutal life on the way to an ending that masterfully ties the many threads together.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A good pick for readers interested in witch trials throughout history, as Cooke melds elements of horror, historical fiction, family drama, and a police procedural into this witchy novel." - Library Journal “ The Book of Witching is brilliant and mesmerizing from start to finish and contains a final act that will have readers simply riveted. C.J. Cooke knows how to scare you, and her combination of the historical and the imagined storylines about actual witching in our world is the stuff of legend.” - Book Reporter C. J. Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in twenty-three languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women's writing and creative writing interventions for mental health. CHAPTER ONE Fynhallow Isle of Gunn, Orkney May 2024 It's almost sunrise. A magenta streak across the horizon, a smooth, glittering sea. The ranger's dog is barking, a wild, staccato squeal that splits the calm. She shouts at him now to be quiet, her voice growing louder, her pace quickening as she moves toward him. He's a springer spaniel, two years old, easily roused. But he's never barked like this before. As though he's afraid. Fynhallow's sand is soft, silken white, a seam that joins the Isle of Gunn to the North Sea. The silhouette of the dog noses and whines at a dark shape by the caves that run along the outcrop. It must be a dolphin, she thinks, perhaps a pilot whale. Except there's no fin, no shape of a tail. She sees the shape of two legs, and gasps. The curious odor that she caught earlier registers: something has been burning. The wind was in the wrong direction before, but now she catches notes of flame and meat. The dog paws the ground near the body; she sees the hands are bound together at the end of bent, blackened arms. Her pulse racing, the ranger reaches for her phone and flicks on the torch, and when the harsh white light falls on a charred grimace she drops the phone to the ground with a shout. It lands upward, the white glare of the torch falling on the body. It is clear that the person is dead. And her torchlight picks out another shape farther along the bay. She breaks into a sprint, talking to the dog as he follows her, soothing him. Somewhere, embers glisten in a nest of twigs like rubies. She lurches to a stop, just where the tide meets the sand. At her feet is the body of a teenage girl, a Nirvana print visible on her sooty T-shirt, tattoos of mermaids and beer cans on her forearms. Her face is encrusted with blood. The ranger crouches, noticing the dog is licking the girl's foot and whining. Oh God, she thinks, fear thumping in her throat. Was this an accident, or murder? She moves her fingers to the girl's neck, gasping with relief as she finds a faint pulse. The girl is still alive. Quickly the ranger snatches up her phone and begins to dial. CHAPTER TWO Fynhallow Isle of Gunn, Orkney January 1594 ALISON I wake to the smell of fire. I rise quickly, scanning the earthen floor of the cottage lest the carpet of ferns I have placed to hold the heat has set alight. Silver moonlight pours through the cottage window that overlooks the bay. Above my bed, the posy of herbs I fastened to the beam is silvered with frost. The air is filled with winter's teeth. I wrap my shawl acr