*THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE* *A TIMES SUNDAY TIMES
AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR* 'A bona fide historical classic' Sunday Times 'Simply one of
the best history books I have ever read' BBC History In the frontier town of Springfield in
1651 peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils livestock ails and property
vanishes. People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and
die. As tensions rise rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes
tangled in a web of spite distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young
couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker
and his troubled wife Mary. It will be their downfall. The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark
real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the
turbulent beginnings of colonial America when English settlers' dreams of love and liberty of
founding a 'city on a hill' gave way to paranoia and terror enmity and rage. Drawing on
uniquely rich previously neglected source material Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World
existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic in curses and enchantments and precariously
balanced between life and death. Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy we
glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the
age of enlightenment. We see in short the birth of the modern world. 'Gaskill tells this
deeply tragic story with immense empathy and compassion as well as historical depth' The
Guardian 'As compelling as a campfire story ... Gaskill brings this sinister past vividly to
life' Erica Wagner Financial Times Sunday Times bestseller November 2022
