The Curewife

The Curewife is the story of Grissel Jaffray, the last woman to be burnt as a witch in Dundee. Her story is brought to light by the chance discovery of an ancient diary in modern day Connecticut. Through the transcription of this diary, a powerful narrative unfolds. Grissel Jaffray has inherited a legacy of ‘uncommon sagacity’: the accumulated knowledge of her forebears who have the gift of healing and practiced withcraft for more than three centuries. Grissel is a woman of keen intelligence whose fictional journal graphically depicts life in seventeenth-century Dundee: a land of war, plague, political turmoil, and fanatical witch-hunts. The struggle for survival echoes down the years to trouble the last of her tormented line. Now the place is New England, a place of peace prosperity and endless possibility. Her descendants’ stories, told in parallel with main narrative, bring ancient fears to today’s business world.Winner of the Dundee Book Prize 2002

Reviews of The Curewife

'This book is to be commended for its highly charged atmosphere and its real sense of the dark and brooding' – Hilary Mantel