Laura Best

"The story of a woman in crisis and her quest, fifteen years later, to apologize to her children and fill in the blanks of her mind." -The Globe and Mail It's 1960, and Elizabeth has a good life. A husband who takes care of her, two healthy children, a farm in Nova Scotia. But Elizabeth is slowly coming apart, her reality splintering. She knows she will harm her children, wants to harm her children, wants to be stopped from harming her children....

Witches are hated in Württemberg, in what is now Germany, in the eighteenth century. It's not so long since they were burned, and any woman who knows too much, who's too clever or quick or skilled at healing, is suspect. Young Lilli knows this, and yet she knows that the wise woman she's learning from, Alisz, isn't evil. She is teaching Lilli which plants cure a fever, which help a cough, which speed a difficult labour. She only wants to help people,...

Lark Harnish, plucky and chatty and full of hope, is starting a new life. It's 1919 in rural Nova Scotia and at just thirteen years old, she has to leave her mother and siblings to go work at the McMasters house. Her father has died and her family desperately needs the money. She arrives expecting another version of her own family-bruised and saddened by the loss of a parent, but still full of love and laughter and stories. Instead she finds a family...