' The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn's ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young
novelist in Europe' Telegraph The Greatest Books of 2025 'Something truly special. A
wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain' Sunday Times Best
Books of 2025 ' An incantation that explores womanhood motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin
Aitken's mesmerising exquisitely precise translation is literally breathtaking.' Irish Times
Books of the Year It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax
child when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days she
carried it tucked beneath her arm shaping it with the warmth of her flesh giving it life. She
fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open and yet - it watches and listens. It looks on
as Christenze is haunted by rumour it hears what the people whisper. It sees how in the
candlelight she gazes with love at her friends and hears the things they say in the shadows.
It knows pine forest misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence
in men's eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time it begins to understand that once a
suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold it can prove impossible to shake... Based on an
infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial The Wax Child is the extraordinary new novel
from Olga Ravn one of the most acclaimed and original writers at work today: a mesmerising
frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and
seawater. 'Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she
does' Samantha Harvey 'I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just
brilliant.' Max Porter 'Addictive and unsettling' Claire-Louise Bennett
