A.K. Blakemore is the author of two full-length collections: Humbert Summer (Eyewear, 2015) and Fondue (Offord Road Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in magazines and journals including "Poetry London" and "Ambit and Magma", and has been anthologised in Bloodaxe’s Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives and The Best of British Poetry 2015. She was a winner of Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2007 and 2008. She lives and works in London.

Wolf Hall meets The Favourite in this beguiling debut novel that brilliantly brings to life the residents of a small English town in the grip of the seventeenth-century witch trials and the young woman tasked with saving them all from themselves. England, 1643. Puritanical fervor has gripped the nation. And in Manningtree, a town depleted of men since the wars began, the hot terror of damnation burns in the hearts of women left to their own devices. Rebecca West, fatherless and husbandless, chafes against the drudgery of her days, livened only occasionally by her infatuation with the handsome young clerk John Edes. But then a newcomer, Matthew Hopkins, arrives. A mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, he takes over the Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about what the women on the margins of this diminished community are up to. Dangerous rumors of covens, pacts, and bodily wants have begun to hang over women like Rebecca--and the future is as frightening as it is thrilling. Brimming with contemporary energy and resonance, The Manningtree Witches plunges its readers into the fever and menace of the English witch trials, where suspicion, mistrust, and betrayal run amok as a nation's arrogant male institutions start to realize that the very people they've suppressed for so long may be about to rise up and claim their freedom.