Some Favourite Witches in Fiction

The Pagan celebration of Samhain or Halloween is a perfect time to celebrate some of the best witchy fiction that I have encountered recently. Witches seem to be an ever popular subject for TV and film but so often they are badly portrayed, presented as worshipers of Satan or actively anti-christian, lumped in with demonic forces, full of lust and sin and evil.  For any followers of the Pagan path this can be very frustrating, so finding a book that presents witches in a more truthful and more flattering light is always a great moment.

One of my most recent witchy reads was Daughter of Light and Shadows by Anna Mckerrow, which is about three young witches who cast a love spell which opens them up to the world of the Fae. Read my review here https://lisareadsbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/daughter-of-light-and-shadows-by-anna.html

Louisa Morgan's tale of a family of hereditary witches moves from Brittany to Cornwall and London to Wales. It's a wonderful story of family and women supporting each other and also the pain that family secrets can inflict. Read my review here. https://lisareadsbooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-secret-history-of-witches-by-louisa.html

Slow Poison is the second book in Helen Slavin's Witch Ways Series it features three sisters who have inherited their grandmother's place as Game Keepers of Havoc Wood. Blending magical realism and dark fairy tale as the sisters struggle to come to terms with their magical abilities. Review here https://lisareadsbooks.blogspot.com/2018/09/slow-poison-by-helen-slavin.html

This is a charming tale set in 1880s New York where the surge of interest in the Supernatural and the Occult means that witches Adelaide and Eleanor can practice their craft openly from their shop Tea and Sympathy offering remedies and spells to the upper class ladies of Manhattan. Review https://lisareadsbooks.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-witches-of-new-york-by-ami-mckay.html

Widdershins is set in the mid Seventeenth Century and features a mother and daughter who practice traditional healing. Set around the Newcastle witch trials this is a wonderfully researched book full of the detail about nature, herbs and their healing properties that many women would have learned at their mother's knee. Review https://lisareadsbooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/widdershins-by-helen-steadman.html

There were not a huge number of witch trials carried out in Ireland in comparison to the rest of Europe. But one famous or rather infamous case was that of the Islandmagee witches. The tale is retold and fictionalised beautifully by Martina Devlin in this fascinating historical novel. Review https://lisareadsbooks.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-house-where-it-happened-by-martina.html