[]
The Wax Child
  • Published: 11 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241752746
  • Imprint: Viking Fiction
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $40.00

The Wax Child

Formats & editions
Hardback
11 Nov 2025
EBook
6 Nov 2025
Audiobook
6 Nov 2025
Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Book Hero Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

Unlike anything you’ve read before, The Wax Child is an extraordinary tale of witchcraft from one of the most visionary writers at work today

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens.

It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake…

Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is the extraordinary new novel from Olga Ravn, one of the most acclaimed and original writers at work today: a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.
  • Published: 11 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241752746
  • Imprint: Viking Fiction
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Also by Olga Ravn

The Employees
See all

Praise for The Wax Child

Olga Ravn tugs skillfully at the treads of reality, subtly distorting events to reveal hidden, dislocated truths

The New York Times

A spellbinding tale of loss and longing. A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.

Kirkus

Dark and strange and beautiful and completely gripping

Mark Haddon

The Wax Child has emerged from an imagination that is wild, visionary, and absolutely original. It is beautiful, eerie, sublime, and, like a fingerprint or a snowflake, only one of its kind. Olga Ravn is a roof-raisingly brilliant writer

Neel Mukherjee

Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There's nobody else doing quite what she does

Samantha Harvey

Olga Ravn descends into a dark historical world of fear and danger, nightmarish fantasy, sordid suffering and blood. Magic is portrayed as a real power not only to be feared, but aspired to by an underclass of disadvantaged yet defiant women

Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin of All Witches

I gulped The Wax Child down and dreamed wild dreams about it. Just brilliant.

Max Porter 

Sinister magic and folk-horror combine into a novel that is as creepingly atmospheric as it is formally impressive.

Foyles Best Translated Fiction of 2025

Addictive and unsettling

Claire-Louise Bennett

An instant classic that feels passed down from centuries ago and yet utterly unique, fresh, and modern. Another stunning, surreal journey from an author who seems to never disappoint

Jeff VanderMeer 

Drawing on folklore, superstition, gossip and historic truth, frequently blending the borders between all four, The Wax Child weaves its strange awful magic like a spell

Daily Mail

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn’s ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young novelist in Europe

Telegraph

Gorgeously mercurial. The best historical fiction can turn the driest archival fact into revelation, and here is proof.

TLS

Something truly special. A wonderfully weird novel full of lines that will rattle around in your brain.

Sunday Times

An incantation that explores womanhood, motherhood and bodily autonomy. Martin Aitken’s mesmerising, exquisitely precise translation is, literally, breathtaking. To be read in one sitting, on a dark winter’s night

The Irish Times – Books of the year 2025