66 books like Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

I love O’Farrell’s use of language–the depth and the poetry—and have read most of her books. I especially liked this book because I read it shortly after my daughter died in 2020, and the maternal and complicated feelings of Hamnet’s mother (Shakespeare’s wife) are so well rendered.

O’Farrell also has a magical way of recreating a time and a place. I think she’s one of the best writers when it comes to getting into a character’s head, too.

The immersive and tragic history of a witch trial in Bideford, Devon, England in 1682 puts the “witches” back at the centre of their story and tries to imagine their world with sympathy and insight. This is a very well-researched book, drawing on documents from the town and printed news pamphlets about the trial, as well as on the author’s wider knowledge of witchcraft and demonology (the study of devils and witches). It evokes the sinister atmosphere in the town very effectively. The story is well told, pacy, and easy to follow, and I learned a lot about the women and their world – telling details that I thought might have been lost to history, but are rediscovered and thrillingly told here.

White Is for Witching is, on the surface, a story about a gothic haunted house, but it opens with a reference to “Snow White”—“Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple / (to stop her speaking words that may betray her)”—and conjures that tale throughout the novel. Collapsing witching, whiteness, and outright racism, White is for Witching suggests that the same racial superiority undergirds “Snow White,” where the eponymous character is celebrated for her whiteness, implicitly naturalized as beauty when she is identified as “fairest in the land.” White is for Witching, like Oyeyemi’s other fairy-tale novels, rewrites European fairy tale conventions to make strange the familiar and to normalize the unexpected, thereby disrupting genre expectations to expose the European fairy tale's underlying racial logics.

A brilliant anthropological account of witchcraft in the Normandy countryside in the 1960s. If it sounds dull, believe me, it isn’t! Jeanne Favret-Saada started her study of magical beliefs among French farmers thinking that she might find some superstitious vestiges of the sort that were laughed at by Parisian intellectuals. Instead, she found a complex, shifting world of theories and suspicions, as gripping as any detective novel. As she was drawn into the world of witchcraft, Jeanne found herself believed to be able to lift curses and began to fear that she herself might have been bewitched.

Her book is about how we tell stories of witchcraft – and indeed tell stories of anything. It made me question whether we could ever write a really solid, factual history of witchcraft: the story of a crime that didn’t exist, told by people who weren’t sure what had happened anyway. I think… show more.

A thoughtful and well-researched novel about the “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, who hunted witches in eastern England during the mid-seventeenth century Civil War. Or rather, it’s not about Matthew but about his fictional sister, Alice. Focusing on Alice is a clever and thought-provoking way of telling a famous story, making us look harder at the women involved in the witch hunt and how they might have felt about their experiences. How did women feel about witchfinders in their families and among their friends? Did they really suspect other women of witchcraft? Were they able to avoid becoming complicit in witch-hunting?

It’s a lively and horrifying story that has a really convincing seventeenth-century feel and it made me uncomfortable. What would I have done if a witch-hunt had come to my village? What would you do?

I was introduced to Brooks’ writing by a fellow journalist because I very much wanted to read a novel by a reporter turned fiction writer.

The writing and the plot of the 1666 plague in this book didn’t disappoint. It was like sinking into a time and place so different from my own, but at the same time so familiar because Brooks is what I call a surround-sound writer. She is able to totally immerse you in a foreign world.

I never imagined I would be so invested in the lives of 12th-century nuns, but here we are.

Groff’s writing has such energy, I was completely consumed by the story of Marie, who, guided by visions, transforms an English convent into a utopia for the nuns within, protected from the world without. I was blown away by the sheer amount of knowledge that adds texture to the book: knowledge of plants, animals, medicinal herbs, clothing.

It feels deeply researched but not tedious. Everything about this novel feels propulsive.

I recommend this book every chance I get when people ask me for a novel that knocked my socks off.

It’s based on real events that happened in Norway, and it reads like Hargrave actually lived in that era because of the rich details. I learned so much, not only about Norway but also about what it was like to live in a harsh climate in a very remote area at a time when there was very little communication between communities.

I couldn’t get the characters, namely Maren, Ursa, and Absalom, out of my head for weeks.  

I became a vegetarian at age 13, and although my parents grumbled about having to prepare different foods, they certainly did not react as strongly as Yeong-hye’s family, who treats her decision as a kind of mental illness.

The book starts off like a dark fable, as Yeong-hye pares down her diet and believes she is turning into a tree. As the book progresses, though, it becomes a feminist allegory that asks questions that have only become more urgent since its publication: Who has the right to say what a woman does with her body?

The first thing I do in the morning is check my phone. And I’m sure I’m not alone in waking to a world I don’t fully recognize. My reassurance is that my friends and family find it equally strange. But what if I was the only one who woke up each day to a world I found baffling?

Kate lives an ordinary life in Manhattan by day, but at night she travels back to Elizabethan England, where she lives a richly detailed dream life. Except Kate doesn’t believe it’s a dream—she believes she’s living two lives, and as the book goes on, details from her present-day reality support her. I love this book because it would be easy to dismiss Kate as mentally ill, but the novel remains ambiguous.