Author(s): Rivka Galchen

Novel | Humour & Satire | Historical

The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances.

The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.

Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.

So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

Praise for Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch:

'Funny in parts, absurd in others ... This riveting novel takes us into the labyrinthine hearts of accused and accusers alike' Margaret Atwood

'Superbly voiced ... funny ... the absurdity, rompiness and obsession with food (usually sausages) are spot on for the era, but so too is an inescapable sense of loss' Telegraph

'A wise meditation on the kind of hysterical scapegoating we see so often in the age of the internet ... I loved this book intensely when I read it this summer and have thought of it nearly every day through this strange autumn' Lauren Groff, Guardian

'Her prose, which recalls Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, is light, pared back and subtly archaic. Moments where she nods at the contemporary obsession with witchcraft are funny rather than sincere ... It's this dry humour that makes the novel sparkle' Financial Times

'It is remarkable that Rivka Galchen's "Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch" manages to pull off ... a witch story that is as serious as Miller's play and as playful as Updike's novel but does not fall prey to the pitfalls of either ... a persuasive and very beautiful work of fiction ... this writer can animate even the most familiar material, and make it beautifully, and memorably, new' Wyatt Mason, Wall Street Journal

'Delightfully funny ... Galchen has written another smart book that investigates the power of narrative, both good and bad, foregrounding a woman who'd only been a footnote to a famous man's story, all while being funny and deceptively easy to read. It's quite a magic trick' Los Angeles Times

'The comedy that runs through [Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch] is a magical brew of absurdity and brutality. Galchen has a Kafkaesque sense of the way the exercise of authority inflates egos and twists logic . . . There's real sorcery here' Washington Post

Author Biography: Rivka Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, Harper's, The New Yorker, Scientific American and The New York Times. This is her first novel.