Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, is where families send their pregnant daughters to give birth in secret, hand over the baby and forget it ever happened. Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives in the stifling summer of 1970, frightened and alone, and finds a dozen girls in the same position: Rose, a hippie determined to keep her baby, Zinnia, a musician planning to marry her child's father, and Holly, barely fourteen and silent. Every hour of their day is controlled by adults who claim to know best, until a librarian slips Fern an occult book about witchcraft.

Grady Hendrix, author of How to Sell a Haunted House, writes horror with a furious heart, and this Sunday Times bestseller is as much about girls denied any say over their own lives as it is about the price of power. For readers who like their Southern Gothic angry, tender and properly frightening.