"Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen's writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time--the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear"--

1618, Wu rttemberg, a German duchy. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun. Fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler, an illiterate widow known for her herbal remedies, is accused of being a witch by Ursula Reinbold, who accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill. Her son Johannes, the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion, must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. -- adapted from jacket