The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel

A novel set during the Salem witch trials that follows Sarah Carrier Chapman, who in 1752 writes a letter to her granddaughter revealing a secret she has kept for sixty years: how she survived the trials when her mother did not. Sarah's account begins over a year before the trials began, when her family settled in a New England community already consumed by superstition and fear. As suspicion spreads between neighbors and friends, the hysteria intensifies until more than two hundred people are imprisoned. Among them is Sarah's mother, Martha Carrier. To protect her children, Martha asks Sarah to commit an act of heresy—a lie that will condemn Martha while saving her daughter. The novel tells the story of Martha's defiance and death through the perspective of the daughter who lived.