The witch panics and trials of early modern Europe were steeped in lurid fictions from the beginning, and some contemporary internet conspiracy theories, such as those espoused by QAnon, still bear traces of their destructive storytelling. Anya Bergman’s The Witches of Vardo reimagines the Finnmark trials of 1662-3, one of the deadliest witch persecutions in Norway. Three women play a crucial role. The first is Anna, a former mistress to the King of Denmark, desperate to escape prison the only way she can, by making witchcraft accusations. Against her stand two heroines: Ingeborg, determined to rescue her mother, falsely accused of being a witch; and the woman who resolves to help her, Maren – an outcast whose own mother has been executed, leaving her exposed to the same fate. Bergman has meticulously researched this historical novel, although you shouldn’t read novels on this subject if you want a nuanced and completely accurate sense of the history. Contemporary gender politics tend to seep in, and this furious and vividly rendered novel – which at times reads like feminist revenge fantasy – is no exception.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin, Canongate, $45

If you can winnow the odd flaky moment, this book offers an inspiring series of musings on how the reality we inhabit is an ongoing act of creation. Rick Rubin’s understanding of creativity is not confined to being an artist. It’s a way of living and being in the world. “We are all participating in a larger creative act we are not conducting,” he says. The starting point is the recognition that all the work we ever do is a collaboration – with what has come before us, everything around us, our experiences, our tools and those we are addressing. Ultimately, it’s about tapping into what Rubin calls “the universe’s timetable”. This may sound too New Agey for some. But if you drop the blinkers, this deceptively simple work approaches life as an artistic enterprise, showing how open-mindedness, curiosity and playfulness expand our sense of what’s possible and allow us to embrace the unknown.

A Little Give
Marina Benjamin, Scribe, $29.99

We all know the existential funk that housework can incite, women more so than men as they have traditionally carried the load. Not to mention the mixed emotions that go with caring for others. Marina Benjamin ruminates on the historical and societal pressures, constraints and value of this work through the lens of her own Iraqi-Jewish family – her dynamic, frustrated mother who drummed into her that “women were put on this planet to please” and her creative father who didn’t question that being looked after was his due. No simple solutions are offered. Instead, she rewardingly riffs on the visceral push and pull of this work. Perhaps, she muses, “the material work of keeping the bodily show on the road ... offers a more immediate, more animal way to engage with [the fear of death] than mere intellectualising. I am here, it says, I am exhausted, sweaty and abased, but I am alive.”

You Are Not Alone
Cariad Lloyd, Bloomsbury, $32.99

“Grief-mess.” A good description of how it feels, in my opinion. This mess is something you carry for the rest of your life, says Cariad Lloyd, who lost her father 25 years ago when she was 15. Although I’m only a month or so into my own grief-mess, this news is strangely reassuring. Forget the notion that there are stages of grief, she says. That there is a right way to do it, that there is a neat path through to the end of grief. The death of a loved one is not something you “get over”. The pain ebbs and flows like a tide, and this is what makes it bearable. Our grief isn’t separable from our love, she says, and “the good bits of life”. Lloyd’s wry mash-up of her own mourning with the experiences of people she has spoken to for her program Griefcast mimics the muddle of grief itself, and gives us permission to be all over the place, fine one moment, sad and bewildered the next.

The One Thing We’ve Never Spoken About
Elfy Scott, Pantera Press, $32.99

Such has been the stigma associated with schizophrenia that when Cameron was diagnosed with the condition, he thought he was “a crazy person” who would end up homeless, without a future. Although now living a fulfilling life, he remains scarred by the loss of friends who could not see past his medical diagnosis. Cameron is one of the quarter of Australians affected by complex mental-health conditions – through their own experience or that of a relative or friend. Having grown up in a loving family where her mother’s schizophrenia was kept secret, Elfy Scott well understands the fear and ignorance driving this silence. But she also knows that breaking the silence is the only way to dispel the stigma at the root of our mental health crisis. With empathy and a sense of urgency, she explores the challenges faced and the ways in which they can be tackled by all of us.

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