With her debut novel A Westerly Wind Brings Witches, Sally A. Walker invites readers to delve into a deep pool of female frustrations, injustice, determination, and triumph that links history to fantasy, creating mystical moments, historical fact, folkloric motifs, and a hearty helping of humour.

Walker’s twisting tale begins with Moira, a young woman of the modern era who sees herself as a failure since it seems her friends always manage to leave her out of the fun. Some mental thrashing, much of it self-directed, leads Moira to Cornwall where she falls in with a coven of stroppy women and is initiated into the ancient art of witchcraft. There she will find eerie, embattled females who, like her, have chosen to gather and hover in an occult realm, emerging propitiously to bedevil those who have rejected them.

Amidst strange witchy happenings Moira uncovers a past life as Hannah, granddaughter of a village wisewoman in the late sixteenth century, a time in which pernicious menfolk rape and imprison at will the women they consider inferior possessions, a time when church and state feared women’s traditional public role and witch trials were at their height.

Hannah’s plight and Moira’s desperate search for a satisfying solution will entail a fascinating flight from the 2020s to 1349, from Covid pandemonium into the pall of the Black Death.

Walker, a successful writer of short stories and poems, has constructed this ambitious work centered on a woman’s slow but sure path to self-respect. In her words, Walker wishes to bring to new attention “a time when women lost their role in folk religion and disappeared from view.” She succeeds in exposing that historical crux through the experience of feisty females determined to be seen, heard, and acknowledged for their unique powers. The author’s rollicking humour, respect for language and intelligent handling of folklore and occultism in the epochs portrayed are imaginatively scattered around all the unexpected corners that comprise her saga. Conspicuously, the literary voice of the early portion of the book set in modern times is distinctly different from the language and lore of the portions set in antiquity, indicating Walker’s considerable wordsmithing skills and diligent research. All these factors satisfyingly bundled gained the novel an award in the 2021 novel writing competition at A Woman’s Write (www.awomanswrite.com).

In A Westerly Wind Brings Witches, Walker presents empathic females whose journey from desperation and denigration to confidence and optimism is acquired through personal grit. Her book will enchant readers from curiosity-driven young adults to world-wise crones, and anyone in between who has ever been able to crow, after expending admirable efforts, “I win through!”

Barbara B. Scott , editor of A Woman's Write