The Witch

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Julia Barlow loses her job and her apartment in the same bad month, so she drives to the one place that still has to take her in. Pemberton is her family's estate in rural Massachusetts, a house that has stood since the 1600s, and her grandmother is the only person left living in it. Julia tells herself she is going to look after the old woman. Really, she is going there to disappear. The house will not let her. Every night the grandfather clock stops at exactly 3:41. The lights cut out with no pattern. And from the hallway outside her bedroom, a voice she cannot place begs for help.

The family has always said Pemberton has a ghost, and the ghost has a name. Caroline was the second wife of one of the first men to own the house. In 1692 she was burned for witchcraft, and according to family lore she lies somewhere on the grounds in an unmarked grave. McFadden gives Caroline her own chapters, told in her own voice, and alternates them with Julia's. The two accounts creep toward each other, and what the house wants from Julia turns out to have less to do with ghosts than with what her family did, and kept doing, to keep a secret in the ground.

This is a change of scenery for McFadden. Her big books have been domestic thrillers about housemaids, husbands and locked doors. The Witch is a gothic haunted house story with a historical half, and the historical half is the reason to listen.

Two women, three centuries apart

The 1692 chapters are the book's engine. Caroline lives in a Puritan town where defending a friend and refusing to join the gossip is enough to make you a suspect. McFadden writes that fear plainly and well. You can feel the room turn against a woman one neighbor at a time, and every chapter ends on a hook. The present-day chapters are lighter. Julia has a grandmother to worry about, a museum curator sniffing around the house, and a family tree with more lies in it than she expected. They move fast and set up the twists, but they do not carry the same weight.

Critics have split along exactly that line. Linda M. Castellitto at BookPage called it a gothic haunted house tale for readers who like history with their mystery, and praised the short chapters and the twists that keep you flipping to the end. Kirkus was harder on it. The review found Caroline's story riveting, with high stakes and gratifying twists, but called the modern frame thin, with villains out of a cartoon and a romance with no chemistry, and summed the book up as a diverting if largely forgettable trifle. Both are fair. The modern chapters are the delivery system. The 1692 chapters are the payload.

Why two narrators make it a better listen

A book with two first-person narrators in two different centuries is built for audio, and Dreamscape Media cast it that way, with Saskia Maarleveld and Marin Ireland sharing the reading. The alternating structure that can feel choppy on the page becomes simple in your ears. A change of voice tells you where you are before a single word of the chapter registers.

Both are safe hands. Maarleveld has recorded several hundred audiobooks, a large share of them historical fiction, including Kate Quinn's The Alice Network, so a Puritan village in 1692 is home ground for her. Ireland is a stage and screen actress who won an Audie Award for best female narrator and has read Fredrik Backman and Anthony Doerr. Neither of them oversells a scare, which matters here, because the book's chills are quiet ones. A clock that stops. A light in an attic that should be empty.

What to expect, and what not to

Do not come for horror. The haunting is atmosphere, not terror, and the book is a mystery wearing a haunted house costume. Come instead for the McFadden twist machine, which is running at full speed by the last third. Some of the late revelations stretch belief, and a reviewer at Storizen was right that they test the limits of logic. If you have read her before you know the deal. You accept a few leaps in exchange for the pleasure of watching the pieces click.

It is a mid-length listen, long enough to let the two timelines breathe but short enough to finish over a weekend of chores. The chapters are brief, which makes it easy to keep saying one more.

The doctor behind the pen name

Freida McFadden is a pen name. The writer behind it is a practicing physician who specializes in brain injury and lives outside Boston, which puts the Massachusetts setting of The Witch in her backyard. She self-published her first novel in 2013 and kept her two careers separate for years, until The Housemaid took off on BookTok in 2022 and made that impossible. The film version with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried arrived at Christmas 2025, and in April 2026 she finally put her real name, Sara Cohen, next to the pen name.

The Witch is a standalone, so there is nothing to read first. It is a good entry point if you have wondered what the fuss is about, and a change of pace if you already know. The Audible free trial covers it.