Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen is on the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize shortlist.

The winner of the $60,000 prize will be announced on Nov. 3, 2021.

In a small German town in 1618 — a time of fear and superstition — an elderly widow is accused of witchcraft. She's no ordinary woman: she's the mother of the renowned mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, and a remarkable character in her own right. In Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Galchen brings Katharina Kepler and her eventful trial vividly to life in a witty tale with contemporary resonance.

Galchen is also the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances and the short fiction collection American Innovations. Her wide-ranging work often appears in the New Yorker magazine.

You can read an excerpt from Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch below.

Herein I begin my account, with the help of my neighbour Simon Satler, since I am unable to read or write. I maintain that I am not a witch, never have been a witch, am a relative to no witches. But from very early in life, I had enemies.

When I was a child, our cow Mare at my father's inn was cross and bitter toward me. I didn't know why. I wouldn't hesitate to put a blue silk ribbon on her neck if she were here today. She died from the milk fever, which was no doing of mine, though as a young child I felt it was my doing, because Mare had kicked me and I had then called her fat-kidneyed. Was she my enemy? It takes time and experience to gain a cow's trust.

Now I'm 70-some years old. I'll spend no more time on the enemies, or loves, of my youth and middle age. I'll say only that I've never before had even the smallest run-in with the law. Not for fighting, not for cursing, not for licentiousness, not for the pettiest theft. Yet attributed to me in this trial is the power to poison, to make lame, to pass through locked doors, to be the death of sheep, goats, cows, infants, and grapevines, even to cure — at will.

I can't even win at backgammon, as you know.

If my defense fails, a confession will be sought through torture, first with thumbscrews, then with leg braces, then with the rack — or something like that. It depends who the council hires for the job. If mercy is taken upon me, I'll be beheaded and then burned. If no mercy is taken, I'll be burned without first being beheaded. That happened to seven women last year in Regensburg. My children, with some help, have been coordinating my defense.

There are two things a woman must do alone: she does her own believing and her own dying. So says Martin Luther. Or so you say that Martin Luther says, or said. I was born the year Luther died. I took Catholic Communion only one time, in error. My daughter Greta is married to a pastor who says that's okay. My son Hans agrees. I hold Luther in highest esteem. He, too, was vilified. Again, I'm grateful to you, Simon, for sitting with me, for writing for me, for being my legal guardian.

This is my truest testimony.

Excerpted from Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen. Published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.