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The Wax Child

By Olga Ravn
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Brief Description
One of the most acclaimed novels of 2025: the International Booker Prize longlisted tale of witches in seventeenth-century Denmark from one of the most exciting writers on the planet. The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn's ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best -... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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One of the most acclaimed novels of 2025: the International Booker Prize longlisted tale of witches in seventeenth-century Denmark from one of the most exciting writers on the planet.

The Wax Child proves Olga Ravn's ahead of the game. She's the strangest - and best - young novelist in Europe' Telegraph, The Greatest Books of 2025

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.

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

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

'Addictive and unsettling' Claire-Louise Bennett

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781405976824

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 September 2026

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd

Contributors:

  • Translated by Martin Aitken

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 15.0mm

Width: 129.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 200g

Pages: 192

Collections

Fiction Fiction in Translation General Fiction Historical Fiction Horror & Supernatural Literary Fiction Olga Ravn Penguin Books Religion & Spirituality

About the Author

Olga Ravn (Author) Olga Ravn is one of Denmark's most celebrated contemporary authors. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, the Ursula K.Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. Her novel My Work won the Politikens Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in the country's maternity rights. She has also written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Granta. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken's translations of Scandinavian fiction are widely published. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the US National Book Awards, among other prizes. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019 and, for the first book in the Morning Star cycle, the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. He lives in Denmark

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