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The Heretic's Daughter

A Novel

Contributors

Read by Mare Winningham

By Kathleen Kent

Formats and Prices

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 3, 2008. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Salem, 1752. Sarah Carrier Chapman, weak with infirmity, writes a letter to her granddaughter that reveals the secret she has closely guarded for six decades: how she survived the Salem Witch Trials when her mother did not.

Sarah’s story begins more than a year before the trials, when she and her family arrive in a New England community already gripped by superstition and fear. As they witness neighbor pitted against neighbor, friend against friend, the hysteria escalates — until more than two hundred men, women, and children have been swept into prison. Among them is Sarah’s mother, Martha Carrier. In an attempt to protect her children, Martha asks Sarah to commit an act of heresy — a lie that will most surely condemn Martha even as it will save her daughter.

This is the story of Martha’s courageous defiance and ultimate death, as told by the daughter who survived.

  • "The panic and horror of the Salem witch trials in Kent's novel is conveyed with dead-eyed calm and an occasional tremor of emotion by Mare Winningham.... Her melodiousness is pleasing to the ear.... At times, the melody overwhelms the meaning, but Winningham is more than capable as a reader, and her reading of Kent's sad tale f women accused and accusing emits a hit of deeply buried, untouchable tragedy."
    Publishers Weekly
  • "Powerful descriptions of 9-year-old Sarah's time in prison are depicted well by the fear, anger, and repulsion Winningham projects into her reading. Author Kent, a tenth-generation descendent of Martha Carrier, who was hanged as a witch in 1692, has an accurate vision for time and place, equaled by Winningham's narration."
    AudioFile

On Sale
Sep 3, 2008
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781600244513

Kathleen Kent

About the Author

Kathleen Kent is the author of the Edgar Award-nominated TheDime, as well as three bestselling historical novels: The Heretic's Daughter, TheTraitor'sWife, and The Outcasts. Kent lives in Dallas, TX.

Learn more about this author