Set in 17th-century England during the reign of James I --- the monarch who wrote his own book on witchcraft --- THE DAYLIGHT GATE is best-selling writer Jeanette Winterson’s re-creation of a dark history full of complicated morality, sex and tragic plays for power.

This is a world where to be a Catholic is a treasonable offense. A world where the new king vows to rid England of “witchery popery popery witchery” and condemns the High Mass and the Black Mass as equivalent heresies punishable by torture, hanging and burning.

This literary suspense tale takes us dark and deep into a brutal period of English history, centered on the notorious Pendle witch trials of 1612 --- an infection of paranoia that crossed the ocean with the Pilgrim Fathers and set the scene for the 1692 Salem witch hunt.

Good Friday, 1612. Pendle Forest. A gathering of 13 is interrupted by local magistrate Roger Nowell. Is this a coven or a helpless group of women trying to save their family from the stake? Already two stand accused of witchcraft. The wealthy and respected Alice Nutter sets out to defend them, haunted by her own past and an entanglement with magick. She doesn’t believe in the Devil, but as she fights for justice, her life is endangered by forces visible and invisible.