The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2022

*A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND BBC HISTORY HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021*

'The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing' Hilary Mantel

'A bona fide historical classic' Sunday Times
Simply one of the best history books I have ever read' BBC History  

In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails & property vanishes. People suffer fits & are plagued by strange visions & dreams. Children sicken & die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches & heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust & denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home & feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker & his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall.     

The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of love & liberty, of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia & terror, enmity & rage. Drawing on uniquely rich, previously neglected source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine & the diabolic, in curses & enchantments, and precariously balanced between life & death.    

Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions & the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world.   

'Gaskill tells this deeply tragic story with immense empathy and compassion, as well as historical depth' The Guardian    

'As compelling as a campfire story ... Gaskill brings this sinister past vividly to life' Erica Wagner, Financial Times