The book opens with one of the most endearing mistaken-identity stories in early English rural fiction: Ann Kerley, a seventy-three-year-old Dorset widow, wakes one morning to discover she has been publicly declared a witch. Her crime? A wild night of thunderstorms has left her looking rather more spectral than respectable, and village gossips have done the rest. What follows is a gentle, sharply observed comedy of errors, as Ann navigates the absurd consequences of her new reputation with formidable pragmatism. These are idylls in the truest sense: not as escapism, but as clear-eyed celebrations of a world where everyone's business is everyone's entertainment, where a kind word can mend a feud, and where the small dramas of harvest and gossip carry the weight of existence. Francis writes with the accumulated patience of someone who knows that village life moves at its own rhythm, and her Dorset emerges as a place where the extraordinary hides in the ordinary, and where being mistaken for a witch might just be the most exciting thing to happen in decades. For readers who delight in the quiet comedy of human nature, who want to step into a world where a cabbage leaf offers the only shade from a merciless sun, and where a village's love for its oddest member is expressed entirely through rumor and interference.
