Hour of the Witch

Hour of the Witch

Chris Bohjalian

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

A young Puritan woman--faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul--plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive historical thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant. Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four years old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in the New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a three-tined fork into the back of Mary's hand, she resolves that she must divorce him to save her life. But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, a woman like Mary--a woman who harbors secret desires and finds it difficult to tolerate the brazen hypocrisy of so many men in the colony--soon finds herself the object of suspicion and rumor. When tainted objects are discovered buried in Mary's garden, when a boy she has treated with herbs and simples dies, and when their servant girl runs screaming in fright from her home, Mary must fight to not only escape her marriage, but also the gallows. A twisting, tightly plotted thriller from one of our greatest storytellers, Hour of the Witch is a timely and terrifying novel of socially sanctioned brutality and the original American witch hunt.


From the Forum

No posts yet

Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update

Recent Reviews

Your rating:

  • cathricc
    Dec 25, 2024
    Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    0
    comments 0
    Reply
  • clubby
    Feb 09, 2025
    Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    0
    comments 0
    Reply
  • Mar 12, 2025
    Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    Too much world build up that the good parts didn’t come until the second half of the book. Although the ending was nice, it was predictable. Took me a while to finish the book for these reasons.

    0
    comments 0
    Reply
  • View all reviews
    Community recs if you liked this book...