Welcome to another Weekend Read post. My featured book this week is The Witch’s Stone by talented author Kirsty Ferry. Kirsty has dropped by today to tell us what inspired her to write this story. So grab yourself a cuppa, get cosy and let’s get chatting to Kirsty.

Blurb

Some legends never die – they wait for you to come home.

When Jess Morgan arrives in Northumberland to research the history of a crumbling chapel, she’s drawn to the legend of the Brinkburn Witch – a woman said to appear when blood is spilled near an ancient standing stone. But the longer Jess stays, the stranger things become. Whispers echo through empty corridors, shadows move where none should, and the boundary between dreams and memory begins to blur.

Over a century earlier, Eliza Stratford turned to the witch for help after a violent betrayal – and sealed her fate with a terrible bargain. Now her story, and the secrets she died to protect, are surfacing again.

As Jess unearths the truth behind the legend, she begins to suspect her own connection to the past runs deeper than she ever imagined – and that some ghosts will do anything to be remembered…

Buy Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Witchs-Stone-Kirsty-Ferry-ebook/dp/B0GQXCPQJ6/

Welcome to my blog Kirsty. Can you tell us a bit about your book and why you wrote it?

Thank you for having me on your blog, Karen! I’m really excited to be publishing The Witch’s Stone, my first book with Boldwood. In a nutshell, it’s a Gothic, witchy timeslip and I’ve loved every minute of creating it. I’ve written lots of other books before this, but they were all firmly ensconced in romance, although some of them were timeslips, so this is a little bit of a departure for me. When I was asked if I could do witchy Gothic timeslip I practically screamed “Yes!” as it is absolutely my favourite thing to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed doing rom coms and contemporary as well, but there is something special about a timeslip. I love the idea of us existing so close to the spirit world that we can slip into it when we are least expecting it. And on the flip side, the people in the past might get just as big a surprise if they find a modern-day person in their lives. There is a school of thought that time isn’t linear and we live alongside other timelines, but who knows. That, anyway, is the direction I found The Witch’s Stone going.

In the story we have three female leads: Eliza, from the Victorian era, Jess from the modern-day era, and Isabel, our witch. Isabel has a talent for slipping through the veil – she’s summoned, for example, by running around a standing stone three times and offering a bit of bloodshed while you call her name. The focus of the book is revenge – always a good thing in a Gothic novel, and as the story gradually unravels, we find there are a lot of things being hidden; dark secrets and murder and wild windswept moors abound. My favourite book is Wuthering Heights, and there’s a strong link to that, I think, in the background and narrative of The Witch’s Stone. I adore the images of Eliza and her soulmate Lucian wandering the moors forever in my book. It’s their happy place after all!

The book is also based on a Northumbrian legend: just one line in a 1904 book, where Brinkburn Abbey, near the Simonside Hills and Rothbury, was recorded as having its own witch living in a nearby cottage; apparently, she had an ‘evil eye’ and local villagers were afraid of her cat. The Witch’s Stone explores that legend and how it might have come about. It’s one of these things where the less is known, the more you can fictionalise it. My next Boldwood book, The Snow Witch, is based on another Northumbrian legend, high up on the wilds of Hadrian’s Wall, where the ashes of a witch were thrown into a stream which springs from a Sacred Well. I anticipate having just as much fun fictionalising that as I have with Isabel from the Simonside Hills.

It sounds fascinating – and creepy! Kirsty. I hope it sells shedloads! Thanks so much for coming on my blog to tell us all about it.

Meet Kirsty

About Kirsty

Kirsty is from the North East of England and won the English Heritage/Belsay Hall National Creative Writing competition in 2009 with the ghostly tale ‘Enchantment’.

Her timeslip novel, ‘Some Veil Did Fall’, a paranormal romance set in Whitby, was published by Choc Lit in Autumn 2014. Many of her subsequent Choc Lit books have since been re-published by Joffe Books, including her popular Cornish Secrets timeslip series. Kirsty now writes dark, witchy, Gothic timeslips for Boldwood, with her first Boldwood book being ‘The Witch’s Stone’.

Kirsty has a BA (Hons) in Literature, and subsequently achieved a Masters with Distinction in Creative Writing from Northumbria University in 2016.

Contact links

Facebook – Kirsty Ferry Author

 Instagram –  @kirstyferrybooks

Website – Rosethornpress.co.uk (which is in the process of being updated)

More books by Kirsty

Amazon Author page: