Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods. In this dark fairy tale, a young woman sets off to pick berries in the depths of the forest, but can't find her way home again. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman who offers her help. Then everything changes. On a journey that will take her to the depths of the witch-haunted woods, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

"A woman strays from the path into a menacing fairytale world... Biblical imagery combines with the sing-song rhythms of fairytale to build an incantatory prose... Hunt's America has always been a violence-soaked, myth-tinged, traumatised land: here it finds its most concentrated expression" - Guardian

"Suspenseful, threat-filled story of witchcraft... Hunt's eerie, sensual sentences are nothing short of incantatory" - Observer

"A perfect book to read when you're safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark" - Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child

"An engrossing scramble of fairy tales... The book's greatest strength is striking, sensual prose" - New Yorker

"Wondrously weird. Beautifully written. A fairy tale for our time" - Sally Gardner

"The setting is colonial America, but Laird weaves together a dark tangle of influences to create a strange tale with a touch of the psychological thriller about it" - Tatler

"An extraordinary piece of hallucinatory brilliance. A supercharged fairytale with an atmosphere I will never forget" - Lenny Abrahamson, director of Room and The Little Stranger

"We're in Angela Carter territory here... mysterious and unsettling and pinsharp in a hallucinatory way" - Daily Mail

"Grim and fearsome" - Sunday Express

"A tale of myths and magic, of subversion and upset, and of dark psychological suspense. It reads something like a fairy tale and something like a thriller - a haunting combination in more ways than one" - Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Hunt's accomplished prose creates the atmosphere of possibility and danger that lurks in the best fairy tales, where anything can happen but everything has a cost. Highly recommended for fans of that amorphous border between fantasy, horror, and literary fiction as found in the work of Kelly Link, in Joy Williams' The Changeling, or in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber" - Booklist (starred review)

"The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations--witchcraft in colonial America--wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense" - Bookbub

"This dark fairy tale will make even seasoned horror fans shudder" - Publishers Weekly

"Tackles witchcraft in colonial America, providing a mythology that's sure to disturb." - Bookriot

"Beautifully delivered example of literary horror... this atmospheric book still absorbs like the best dark fairy tales and will leave readers chilled to the bone" - Library Journal

"Part psychological thriller, part fairy tale, part mystery, and entirely Hunt's own" - TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos

"A thrilling, magical tale that straddles two worlds: the harsh, at times grim reality of colonial New England, and the imaginative shadow world from which the oldest fairy tales are woven" - Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter

"I adored this book and found it to be entirely spellbinding and scary and strange... It carries us along in a current of intoxicating dread, bearing witness to one woman's dreamlike journey of the soul" - Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

"A wonderful, luminous, sly tale that orbits around a very grim core, growing darker and darker as it goes. A stunning contemporary fairy tale" - Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

"This is a book which will both enrapture you for the beauty of its telling and frighten you to death. Hypnotic, mnemonic and haunting, it plays with all your senses and your fears: of the image at the corner of your eye on a pitch-black night, of the deep woods, or the place within yourself where you might be scared to go." - Anna Vaught, author of Saving Grace

"Beguiling, fluid and unsettling... A dream darker than dreams, a darkness brighter than night" - David Greygoose, author of Brunt Boggart