Estonia, at the end of the seventeenth century: Laurentius arrives in the country, accompanied by a rose-ringed parakeet and hounded by melancholy. He has come to study the latest research - on bloodletting, the evil eye, the position of the soul in the body... Meanwhile the poor are being devoured by hunger and the city walls of his university town don't keep them out; in his feverish sleep he dreams of a king with a high crown, and his waking life is stalked by paranoia.

Compelling, evocative and beautifully written, The Willow King is an unsettling tale of a time of witchcraft, of public executions and public dissections, when science and the supernatural were intertwined.