***A spellbinding, beautifully* written novel that moves between contemporary times and one of the most fascinating and disturbing periods in American history--the Salem witch trials.**
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest--to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.
As the pieces of Deliverance's harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem's dark past then she could have ever imagined.
Written with astonishing conviction and grace, *The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane* travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation.
This description comes from the 2009 Voice hardcover edition.
Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer of historical fiction. Her adult novels are The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009 and was named one of USA Today’s top tend books of the year, and The House of Velvet and Glass, which was a USA Today bestseller in 2011. For young adults, Katherine has written Conversion, which received the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award in young adult literature, and a New York City-based literary ghost story called The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen, which was named a 2016 “Must Read” for young adults by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. In 2014 she edited The Penguin Book of Witches for Penguin Classics, a primary source reader on the history of witchcraft in England and North America which made a regional bestseller list and which has been translated into Spanish. The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, her new novel for adults, will be published by Henry Holt and Co in summer 2019. She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” the BBC, and the History Channel, and she hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for National Geographic. Her fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. In 2015 she was the visiting writer in residence at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, and she spent 2016 as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She holds a BA in art history and philosophy from Columbia and an MA in American and New England studies from Boston University, and she has taught American history, visual culture, and writing at BU and Cornell. Her first published works were three brief catalogue essays in an architectural monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. A native Houstonian, she lives in New England and New York City with her family, where she is at work on her next novel.
([source][1])
[1]: https://www.katherinehowe.com/
