Bright I Burn
Molly Aitken
Available as Hardback
A blazing tale of power, patriarchy and sexuality, based on the true story of the first woman in Ireland to have been condemned as a witch
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024
In thirteenth-century Ireland, a woman with power is a woman to be feared.
When a young Alice Kyteler sees her mother wither under the constraints of family responsibilities, she vows that she won’t suffer the same fate. Soon Alice discovers she has a flair for making money, and builds a flourishing business. But as her wealth and stature grow, so too do the rumours about her private life. By the time she has moved on to her fourth husband, a blaze of local gossip and resentment culminates in an accusation that could prove fatal.
Inspired by the first recorded person in Ireland to have been condemned as a witch, Bright I Burn gives voice to a woman lost to history, who dared to carve her own space in a man’s world.
“Mesmerising … An imaginative, very stylishly written and entertaining book”
irish Times
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“Extraordinary … Some of the best prose I’ve read”
Elaine Feeney
“Gripping”
new Yorker
“An incredible medieval life rendered in incandescent flashes”
kirkus
“Vividly recreates medieval Ireland, its challenges and customs, its increasingly influential clergy, its gossiping townspeople. There’s an ever-encroaching sense of death and violence, whether in the harsh natural world or the brutal world of men. Amid this, Alice is a driven and often ruthless woman”
irish Times
Molly Aitken
Molly Aitken was born in Scotland and brought up in Ireland. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, for which she won the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction 2023, Banshee, and has been dramatized for BBC Radio 4. Her first novel The Island Child was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Molly is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and History at Sheffield Hallam University.
@MollyAitken1 | @molly.aitken