The Miracles: A Novel

Based on the true story of the last witchcraft trial in Britain during WWII, The Miracles explores the dark underbelly of a little-known side of history, the thin line between life and death, and the forgotten story of a case that gripped a nation.

1942: As war wages in Europe, a British battleship is sunk off the coast of Egypt, and a psychic medium on the coast of England summons the ghosts of the dead sailors aboard. For Iris Remington, a frustrated London journalist relegated to “women’s interest” stories, séances are nothing more than a way for fraudsters to make money from people’s loss. But when her editor assigns her the story, Iris is forced to admit that she has a vested interest in whether this spiritualist can, in fact, see ghosts: after all, her husband has been missing in action for two years, and she doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive.

1905: Helen MacFarlane is a young girl in the Scottish Highlands, where legends of witches are whispered on the wind. She’s eight when she first discovers that she is different—that she hears things she shouldn’t hear. In the coming years, she will be labeled strange and wrong, and cast out of her family home, forced to make her way in the factories of Dundee. It’s only when she meets Henry Duncan, a wounded veteran of WWI, that she recalls the voices that she was forced to silence…and realizes there may be a better use for her powers.

1944: In the two years since she first encountered Helen Duncan, Iris has been haunted by what she saw and felt in that séance room—and what it means for her husband, whose fate is still unknown. But when Helen is arrested under the Witchcraft Act—the first witch trial in Britain in centuries—Iris is drawn even further into the murky and mysterious world of mystics, mediums, and voices from beyond the grave.

As the case unfolds, Iris finds herself in the center of a trial that’s as much about magic and hoaxers as it is about espionage and government secrets. And as the verdict looms, both women are forced to confront the ghosts in their own lives. From the early days of the twentieth century through some of the most consequential events of WWII, The Miracles is both sweeping and intimate, deeply imagined and wholly lived-in.