Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

Praise for Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch: 'Superbly voiced...funny...the absurdity, rompiness andobsession with food (usually sausages) are spot on for the era, but so too is an inescapable sense of loss' Telegraph 'Her prose, which recalls Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, is light, pared back and subtly archaic. Moments where she nods at the contemporary obsession with witchcraft are funny rather than sincere... It's this dry humour that makes the novel sparkle' Financial Times It is remarkable that Rivka Galchen's Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch manages to pull off what, broadly speaking, is a witch story, one that is as serious as Miller's play and as playful as Updike's novel but does not fall prey to the pitfalls of either . . . a persuasive and very beautiful work of fiction. Or, it's not strange at all, given how everything that Ms. Galchen has written to date has been singular . . . Galchen's work has been notable for the purity of her prose, her formal resourcefulness, and the sheer pleasure she delivers . . . this writer can animate even the most familiar material, and make it beautifully, and memorably, new. Wyatt Mason, Wall Street Journal 'Delightfully funny . . . Galchen has written another smart book that investigates the power of narrative, both good and bad, foregrounding a woman who'd only been a footnote to a famous man's story, all while being funny and deceptively easy to read. It's quite a magic trick' Los Angeles Times 'The comedy that runs through [Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch] is a magical brew of absurdity and brutality. Galchen has a Kafkaesque sense of the way the exercise of authority inflates egos and twists logic . . . There's real sorcery here, but it arises only from the way Galchen fuses ancient and modern consciousness' Washington Post