Temperance Lloyd

In 1682, in the Devon town of Bideford, Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles were hanged as witches, among the last women in England to die that way. B Chris Nash asks how educated people let it happen: physicians trained in learned discourse turning on natural healers, a Church that held disbelief in witchcraft to be disbelief in God, and a conviction built on hearsay to satisfy an angry crowd.

The novel steps between the lines of the record to give the three women lives of their own. Then it loosens its hold on time, wondering whether Temperance lingers among today's herbalists and whether the old men in the dark corner of the bar have always been there. It is a quietly angry book for readers drawn to forgotten injustices and the uneasy ground where history meets the uncanny.