THE WAX CHILD

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn s ahead of the game She s the strangest and best young novelist in Europe Telegraph The Greatest Books of 2025 Something truly special A wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain Sunday Times Best Books of 2025 An incantation that explores womanhood motherhood and bodily autonomy Martin Aitken s mesmerising exquisitely precise translation is literally breathtaking Irish Times Books of the YearIt was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human For days she carried it tucked beneath her arm shaping it with the warmth of her flesh giving it life She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open and yet it watches and listens Soon it will begin to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold it can prove impossible to shake Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial The Wax Child is the extraordinary new novel from Olga Ravn one of the most acclaimed and original writers at work today a mesmerising frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist T