"Stories," the narrator of Witches' Rings tells us, "are wiser than we, and more mindful, and slowly they change us." Kerstin Ekman's stories are deeply committed to this very kind of gradual but inevitable change. Witches' Rings portrays the history of a rural society in a new light, tracing its development through the lives of working class women and children rather than authorities and decision-makers. The central character is a woman so anonymous that her name is not even mentioned on her gravestone. This novel, written in 1974, is the first volume of a tetralogy which follows a Swedish community through a hundred years of recent history to the present day.


Kerstin Ekman (b. 1933) has often been described as the most prominent living Swedish novelist. She was a member of the Swedish Academy of Arts and Letters from 1978 to 1989 and has received several major literary prizes, including the Selma Lagerlöf prize in 1989.