Time’s Echo

Travel Guide

York 1500s was a place of witchery and witchcraft. A city where women were suspected of being witches by doing normal every day things and even nothing at all. Being a woman in York society at the time meant having a good name and being married. This was deemed to be the rightful and respectable place for a woman and anything different could lead to her destitution or even death.

This book is full of evocative and colourful imaginary – the water in  a city built on the banks of a river, the many rotten apples lysing around and the omnipresent spirits when in the present day. Past and Present merge and flow into each other with ease. As Grace becomes unsure of what is real now and what has existed before becomes all the more blurred.

A world of control and power over women separated by centuries but with similar problems and worries. Greed, power and ambition have thwarted women for centuries and superstition too.

One of the evocative settings in the story centers around the courts who dealt with petty crimes such as neighbour nuisances and blocked drains – issues which affected the masses and which were part of life in the city at the time.  William Beckwith really was a mercer in York at the time, as was tailor John Harper and other characters in the novel.

Fact and fiction, history and present day – merged in mystical York