The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson Claudia FitzHerbert

The story of the Pendle witch trials in 1612 is well known, thanks to the publication of The Wonderfull Disoverie of Witches in Lancashire by Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancashire Assizes in which ten of the 12 accused were condemned to death by hanging. But it is also unknown because Potts’s certainties are not ours. We know who was accused of what but not why, although several of the cases collapsed into each other, with one defendant being released after a witness was ‘proved’ to have been in the pay of a Catholic priest. Witchery and popery were equally reprehensible, target culture making it imperative for Potts and his cronies to nail someone for something.

Jeanette Winterson is the latest in a long line of fabulists to be attracted to this mix of information and its opposite, and she swoops on the story like the falcon she gives to her heroine.