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

A subversive tapestry stitched together with poetry, beauty and violence

Financial Times

Every word in The Wax Child feels spontaneous, every scene alive, as if Ravn and Aitken had lived and breathed its mysterious atmospheres in order to deliver them to us. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this haunting, gripping and singular historical novel cast a spell on us.

The International Booker Prize 2026 judges