The Wax Child

In 1620, in the Danish town of Aalborg, a series of witch trials sends women to their deaths. Among them is Christenze Kruckow, a noblewoman long shadowed by accusations of sorcery. Olga Ravn resurrects these real, historically executed women and tells their story through one of the strangest narrators in recent fiction: a wax child — a small figure shaped from wax, which in Scandinavian folklore serves as a vessel for dark magic — that watches, listens, and speaks.

Through the wax child's uncanny, all-seeing eyes, the novel reconstructs the lives of women on the margins: their intimacies and grievances, the accusations that consume them, and the machinery of a society eager to name and destroy a witch. Ravn threads genuine historical material — letters, spells, court records, and Scandinavian grimoires — through her prose, blurring the line between document and incantation.

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Wax Child (translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken) is a haunting, formally daring work of historical fiction — a folk-horror-tinged portrait of persecution, womanhood, and the objects that hold our secrets.