Weyward

Weyward is a novel by the British-Australian writer Emilia Hart, published in 2023. It mixes historical fiction with supernatural elements, and it reached the New York Times bestseller list on publication.

The book braids three lives. Altha, in the seventeenth century, is tried for witchcraft after the death of a man she had reason to dislike, and her defence rests on a knowledge of plants and animals that the court cannot read correctly. Violet, in 1942, is a girl more interested in entomology and in trees than in the education her family has planned for her, and a chain of events at the family's country house changes what she is willing to accept.

Kate's story is the third and the closest to the present. She leaves London for Cumbria and a cottage called Weyward, inherited from a great-aunt she hardly knew, and what she finds there connects her to the two women who came before her. Each of the three has a relationship with the natural world that is both a resource and the reason she is feared, and the novel sets their three accounts alongside one another.