Kate Macdonald is a writer, literary historian and recovering publisher. THE SHETLAND WITCH was her first novel and has been joined by the novella collection STORIES FROM THE SHETLAND WITCH, and her new novel RADICAL MAGIC (1/9/26), all self-published by The Peachfield Press at https://peachfieldpress.uk/shop/. Her SFF short stories have appeared in various magazines, including Shorelines of Infinity, Solstitia and The House of Long Shadows. She reviews SFF for Strange Horizons. Activities that conspire to keep her from writing include organising, clerking, walking, knitting and trying to manage the garden. She lives in Malvern in the UK with her husband and a pondful of frogs.

The Shetland Witch by Kate Macdonald

The Shetland Witch is a novel about magic, sisterhood and learning to be human.

Hazel is an itinerant archaeologist, working precariously in the Shetland Isles, with latent magical skills she has long forgotten. She is noticed by the three remaining Shetland witches: Ishabel, a retired professor of botany, Maggie the artist who is getting too casual about shape-changing in public, and Avril the wildlife warden who has an elderly mother and can't concentrate on her witch work.

Maggie invites Hazel to become a Shetland witch, but how will Hazel learn how to do magic again?

Then Atropos arrives, to look for her shears that she sent into hiding to the ends of the earth thousands of years ago. She has to protect them from Zeus. Hazel has to protect her archaeological dig. Then the witches have to protect the islands from a Fate, a god and a malignant trow with a penchant for eighteenth-century manners.

CURATOR'S NOTE

One kind of fantasy novel I greatly enjoy is magic set set on our own planet Earth. Few people do this sort of story better than Kate Macdonald. The Shetland Witch is set in the Shetland Isles, a rough and beautiful scattering of 500 islands in the North Atlantic, and tells the tale of three women encountering Greek gods and goddesses, fairy folk, and rediscovering their lost selves . After reading this story, I was planning a trip to this wild, magical place that came alive in Kate's lyrical writing. I wouldn't be surprised if you might plan your own trip once you've finished it too. – The SFWA

 

REVIEWS

  • "If you strip away the plot, The Shetland Witch is really an extended meditation on what it means to belong somewhere … The witches are the last of a line, exhausted and overworked, holding back a tide of malignant trows, like Tornost, a particularly nasty piece of eighteenth-century work, with little recognition. The joy of the novel is watching these five women form a found family not based on destiny, but on the simple, radical act of helping each other with their respective messes."

    – The Ginger Nuts of Horror

  • "This is hugely immersive read. Macdonald has a skill for making us see the Shetland Isles as a living breathing place that is also quite magical; taking us for a time into Atropos' head we see the Island as something quite unique. A collection of isles with ancient history of thousands of years and a meeting place already for various mythologies."

    – Run Along the Shelves

  • "Macdonald writes beautiful and evocative prose, creating a real sense of place and mood with a few well-chosen words. And her characterisation is excellent. From Greek Fates to Shetland witches to an archaeologist who discovers she is more than she seems, Macdonald brings her characters to life and makes her readers care about them. The Shetland Witch is full of charm and warmth, a delightful story about people coming together that never sacrifices its inventiveness or intelligence."

    – Fantasy Hive
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Prologue to The Shetland Witch

Ancient stone walls run all over the inhabited islands in Shetland. Massive cairns and stone markers were built in high places around the coastline, as watchtowers and monuments, and waymarks. Carefully made circular stone brochs sit near water, defending islands and harbours. There are hundreds of standing stones: lonely monuments, or stubby arrays lined up in rows, buried under grass or pointing at a small hill. Three modest stone circles survive, on the islands furthest north.

The Fetlar circle might be the petrified remains of a party of trows. The Unst circle might be an ancient cremation cemetery. The Yell circle might be what was left when Thor had finished playing a game of dice. Nobody knows.

Shetland is at the ends of the earth, a sandy northern archipelago covered in peat muirs and wide flat glens heading north to the Arctic. The headlands are blunt-nosed or ragged with skerries, braced against the wind and the waves. The land undulates between whale-backed hills and small lochs feeding burns that tumble down to the sea. The hills are bare and mottled with red-brown peat moss, yellow and green tussocky grass and deep-brown soil where the sand has blown away. Limestone outcrops as grey rock and shiny white quartz. There are hardly any trees. They only grow in the lee of some hills and houses in the better soil, and only thrive when they're not exposed to the salt in the air.

There are more than five hundred islands in Shetland, but humans only live on twenty of them. Other things live on the other islands, permanently or just passing through. A long time ago some of these things must have spoken to human women when they were out looking for a sheep in the fog or down at the byre in the early morning. Some things might have taught the women special skills, with air and time and silence. It took a fair few years, mind, but good knowledge came of it.

The women who learned how to mend and heal became the witches. They worked for the good of the folk, and they were well regarded. This was a very long time ago, before the monks came, before the first kirk was built. Once Shetland was Christian, witches kept their work out of sight. They healed and mended where it was needed, and more or less they mostly stayed out of trouble. For centuries there were Shetland witches in many places. Yet over time all these places lost their witches through natural causes. Now there are only three Shetland witches. Meet them now.

Ishabel is the eldest. Professor Ishabel Inkster DSc DPhil, professor emerita of botany and plant science at universities in Scotland and Kenya. Lead author of four standard textbooks. Former botany editor of Nature. She is retired and living with intermittent chronic fatigue due to long covid. She is the wisest of the Shetland witches by virtue of her exceedingly long life and great experience. She is respected by her neighbours in Unst. Her garden is remarkably successful. She has deep roots in Shetland. Her husband died a long time ago.

Then there is Maggie Forbister RSA, a tall, rangy artist who lives happily alone in a messy house on the edge of Baltasound in Unst. She studied art in Glasgow and has had many exhibitions. Two works by her sit in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She sells her paintings through Shetland's art galleries and gift shops, and through a website managed by a friend in the know. Maggie is impetuous, reckless, powerful, affectionate and determined. She is tough on fools. She's younger than Ishabel, and her hair is still red. She changes the sculptures in her garden with the seasons.

Now meet Avril Simbister, who is younger still. Avril is too busy running a wildlife rescue centre and managing the North Isles' nature reserves. She trains volunteers and is always at the call of the tourist authorities. She lives in North Mainland in a rented house in Brae, from which she can whizz up and down the roads in her red electric car, which does quite remarkable mileage for the number of charging points available. She also keeps an eye on her mother in Lerwick, when her mother will admit to needing help. Avril got away from Shetland for four years to study for her business degree, and she played the fiddle in a jazz trio before the islands claimed her back. Avril is the strongest witch, and this frightens her.

On what do the Shetland witches exercise their talents? Cliff rescues, now and then. Boats in trouble at sea. The birds that need keeping an eye on. An occasional magical incursion. Preventing mischief or worse by the last of the trows, of course. Routine maintenance of the protections established centuries ago by a much larger population of sister witches. They do their work patiently, but they're feeling stretched. Avril says something about looking to the hills from whence cometh their help, but she's only joking; she was brought up in the kirk. Maggie is concerned about the new satellite launch station at Saxa Vord. Ishabel just wants to feel properly well again, but she also supposes that she may finally be getting old. They are looking for new recruits, natural witches they can trust.