A fictionalised version of astronomer Johannes Kepler's mother's witch trial, which I vaguely remember being a thing, but couldn't have said much about. It's in the format of found documents, intercutting Frau Kepler's account of events as dictated to a literate neighbour, the neighbour's own notes and musings, letters of petition, and transcripts from the trial. I should read a non-fiction account, as I'm very curious how much of it was straight translation from the existing documents, and how much the author tweaked or made up (other than the dictated account and the fictional neighbour).

It's a portrait of small-town politics gotten very out of hand, and people doubling down to try to save face and cover up their mistakes. It could be your strata at war with itself, except everyone is but also trying to get this one lady tortured and murdered! Katharina Kepler herself was mostly a cranky older lady who was more than happy to get into petty feuds and piss people off. One of her daughters in law is addicted to lurid pamphlets that are often about contemporary witch trials, and play a shocking comparison to arguing about which baker's bread was underweight, or who owned what field. At the same time, the Thirty Years War is kicking off, people (children especially) drop dead at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason, who follows what religion is a hot topic, and it's easy to see why people are grasping for explanations about why life is so precarious. It's a nice example of people in a different time believing and behaving differently than they do in the twenty first century.

I did find the debate about who was a witch and how to prove it versus Frau Kepler complaining about forty years of bickering a little one note, and the book's pretty slow overall, the trial dragging out for six years with very little actually happening. I was glad to have the audiobook, which was read with great verve, it added a good deal of life into the trial transcripts, etc, and managed all the German names.