Bright I Burn

July 15, 2024
The blistering latest from Aitken (The Island Child) gives voice to Alice Kyteler (1280–1325), the first Irish woman convicted of witchcraft. Aitken portrays Alice, who evaded her punishment by fleeing the country, as a formidable figure and nobody’s idea of a victim. Having inherited an inn and a banking and lending business from her father, Alice goes through four wealthy husbands, all of whom die suspiciously, before coming to the attention of an ambitious new bishop, who accuses her of witchcraft. Alice makes a beguiling heroine whose lust for money, power, and sex are constrained but never thwarted. Some of her actions are horrifying—she shoves one of her husbands down the stairs to his death, and fatally poisons another—but Aitken never wavers in portraying her humanity. Particularly striking are the depictions of Alice’s sorrow at the death of her young daughter and at the growing distance between her and her son. The novel moves through the decades in sharp, poetic vignettes told from Alice’s point of view, which are interspersed with commentary from a chorus of judgmental villagers (“I always thought there was something unnatural about her”; “Rich people are so odd”). It adds up to a fiercely intelligent and often surprising examination of a woman’s choices and their consequences. Agent: Hellie Ogden, WME.

July 15, 2024
A novel set in 13th-century Ireland detailing the life of the first woman in that country to be convicted of witchcraft. Everyone in Kilkenny knows Alice Kyetler. Her father, an innkeeper and a lender, has passed his business onto her. As a woman banker, she is shrewd; as a marriage prospect, she is intimidating, with her independence and fearlessness. Eventually she marries William Outlaw, another moneylender, with whom she has a son and a daughter. Outlaw is no match for the fiery Alice--he lacks interest in her, especially sexually, much to her impatience--and when their daughter dies, a shattered Alice's eyes begin to rove elsewhere. After Outlaw himself dies, Alice moves from one wealthy husband to the next, each one dying under circumstances that set the rumor mill humming, eventually culminating in an unprecedented accusation that will change history forever. For those who have read books like Madeline Miller'sCirce or Natalie Haynes'Stone Blind, the story's contours are familiar, at least at first: A woman with a bit too much power, pride, and ambition gets put in her place by a society all too eager to uphold conventions. But Aitken herself eschews convention: The historical novel, usually stuffed with worldbuilding and contextual detail, here unfolds via a lyric impressionism, moving like skipped stones through Alice's life from girlhood to old age. As the novel hits the middle of Alice's story, these stones skip faster, upping the tension. And unlike, say, Circe, Alice is less a misunderstood woman than, like many of history's greatest figures, villain and victim in one, complex and elliptical. "Did you never wish to know what it is to be ordinary, unseen?" Alice is asked as a young woman. "No, and I certainly never will," she replies. An incredible medieval life rendered in incandescent flashes.

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September 1, 2024
In thirteenth-century Kilkenny, Alice Kyteler makes her living via usury, with selfinterest and avarice her guiding principles. Chapters are named for the procession of men in Alice's life: her father and each of the four husbands she buries. Alice, a strong woman with strong desires, is entirely self-made: "I am my own creation," she pronounces, and admits that everything good must die and "that's why I keep living." When a covetous little Franciscan becomes Bishop of Ossory and Alice's many step- children seek vengeance for being disinherited by her machinations, accusations of murder and witchcraft swirl. Ireland in the thireenth and fourteenth centuries is a ruthless place, and Aitken's vivid prose cuts with an edge as sharp as Alice herself. Suspense is retained throughout, with Alice's husbands all very different types of men, and even the villains afforded a measure of three-dimensionality. Aitken's Alice is multifaceted. While others have fictionalized her (such as Niamh Boyce's Her Kind, 2019), this is a poetically written take on the fascinating historical woman at the center of one of Ireland's few witchcraft prosecutions.

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