Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a historical novel by the American writer Rivka Galchen, published in 2021. It is a fictionalised account of real events, and it builds on the documents left by a trial.

The setting is a German duchy in 1618, at the start of the Thirty Years' War, with plague moving through the country. Katharina Kepler is a widow who lives on her own, treats her neighbours with the herb remedies she knows, and has outlived most people of her generation, all of which is enough to make her a subject of talk.

The accusation comes from a neighbour, Ursula Reinbold, and it grows from one woman's complaint into a case that the whole community takes part in. Katharina's son is Johannes Kepler, the imperial mathematician, and he has to put aside his work on the motions of the planets and take up the task of defending her, with the help of his siblings and of a legal guardian. The book is written largely in Katharina's own voice, with the depositions and gossip of her neighbours set against it, and it is concerned less with whether magic exists than with how a community comes to agree on what it fears.