A novel that tells a four-hundred-year-old tale of witchcraft and intrigue, reimagining the life of a servant girl who accuses her neighbors of being witches. Michael Cawood Green's novel The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong calls up the lost voice of a fourteen-year-old girl who, between January and May 1673, made some of the most dramatic accusations in the history of English witchcraft and then disappeared, leaving behind the mystery of what drove her to insist, in the face of rejection after rejection, on telling so strange a story—ultimately at the cost of her own life. Fantastic yet compelling, Anne Armstrong's accusations against her neighbors in an isolated part of the Tyne Valley were recorded in the court depositions that form the basis for this literary thriller from Goldsmiths Press. Following a fictional historian who becomes obsessed with tracking Anne through each twist and turn of the legal proceedings, the reader is drawn ineluctably into the shadowy world where Anne's dark tale plays out to its devastating end. T he narrative is shot through with questions: Why does Anne risk being suspected of witchcraft herself as she accuses an ever-increasing number of others? Is she seeking revenge, or does she want to earn money as a witch finder? How does a young, illiterate woman have such detailed knowledge of esoteric forms of witchcraft? How does she learn to understand and manipulate the legal process? Is she a victim of her own hallucinations? Or is she telling the truth—the truth as she sees it, as perhaps only she can see it? And, finally, how does she meet her lonely death in the building which—if reports about appearances of her ghost are to be believed—she has never left?
On a remote mission station a monk buries the heart of his Superior beneath the great iron cross overlooking the no-man’s-land between the colonies of Natal and the Cape. He then begins to write his own account of his dead leader and friend Abbott Franz Pfanner, charismatic leader of the Trappists in South Africa and much mythologised founder of Mariannhill monastery and its chain of missions. Under Pfanner, Mariannhill became one of the largest abbeys in the world, but only at a terrible price. The narrator of this extraordinary tale is witness to a story that ranges from Austria to Bosnia, Natal to East Griqualand. Aptly named after Joséph of Cupertino, the Holy Fool and Gaper, his attempt at proclaiming the sins of others and confessing his own draws the reader into a vivid sense both of the silent life of the Trappists and the storm that breaks as Mariannhill drifts into the world of words. Here faith, contemplation and grace become intimately intermingled with demonic possession, madness, even murder.
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