Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel

Written by Rivka Galchen

Narrated by Natasha Soudek

"It’s both transfixing and destabilizing. It’s the best thing I listened to all winter." —Alexis Gunderson, PASTE Magazine

The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from Rivka Galchen, the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances.

The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.

Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.

So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250818232

Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

Reviews for Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

[Stacey McAlexander · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Can’t listen to this narrator! Way to dramatic and distracting.

[Samantha Jones · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good story. Trial was a bit long winded. Narration could have been a tad bit more light. Was a drudge listen at times.

[Andrew Seidl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

(3.5/5)

this one’s tough, as i really wanted to like it right from the start. while i almost gave up on it a couple times from sheer boredom, i am glad i stuck through to get to the middle of the novel, which is actually quite riveting. nevertheless, by the time the novel approaches its denouement, let’s just say it is a rapid descent to a tepid, ambulatory epilogue that tidies everything up a bit too nicely (in my opinion) and severely suffers from the lack of katharina’s voice. though, given the subject matter, that is likely the point—it just didn’t work for me.

[random, re: the audiobook: how is chamomile pronounced “camilla?” does the german pronunciation somehow drop of the “o” sound?]

[ali lovell · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I couldn’t get through this audio book because of the narrator was over-dramatized and really hard to listen to :( I’ll need to try the print instead