Willow King
Subtitle: The Birds of the Muses
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2017
Place of publication: UK
Language: eng
Translated from: est
Translation of: Mesilased
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781782271741
Description: Estonia, at the end of the seventeenth century: Laurentius arrives in the country, accompanied by a rose-ringed parakeet and hounded by melancholy. He has come to study the latest research - on bloodletting, the evil eye, the position of the soul in the body... Meanwhile the poor are being devoured by hunger and the city walls of his university town don't keep them out; in his feverish sleep he dreams of a king with a high crown, and his waking life is stalked by paranoia.

Compelling, evocative and beautifully written, The Willow King is an unsettling tale of a time of witchcraft, of public executions and public dissections, when science and the supernatural were intertwined.