The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Sangu Mandanna's The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, published in 2022 by Berkley and Hodder & Stoughton, is a cozy fantasy and romance novel. It is her first novel for adults, and it is set in a version of contemporary Britain where witches practise in secret and in isolation because their kind has a habit of dying young, and where the only rule they keep is to avoid one another.

Mika Moon is a witch who has spent her life moving on, keeping her magic hidden and her distance intact. She was born in India, orphaned young and brought to the United Kingdom by a friend of her grandmother, who acted as her guardian and was rarely present, and she has been largely on her own since. To share a little of what she loves she posts videos playing the owner of a magic teashop, which is a performance nobody takes seriously.

One of those videos reaches a man who needs exactly what she can do. Three young witches are being raised at a house called Nowhere House by adults with no magic between them, and a lawyer's visit in six weeks will expose all of it unless the children learn to control themselves. Mika takes the job, and the household turns out to be warm in a way she has never experienced, with one exception: Jamie, the librarian, has no interest in a stranger living in his home and makes that plain.

Mandanna wrote the novel as a self-contained story rather than the start of a series, and it establishes Mika, the children at Nowhere House and the small community of witches who mostly stay out of each other's way. It is a romance as much as a fantasy, and its central problem is a household rather than a kingdom, with the children's magical education and the adults' separate griefs sharing the same rooms.