The Witches is a children’s dark fantasy novel by the British writer Roald Dahl. The story is set partly in Norway and partly in England, and features the experiences of a young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother. The book was adapted into an unabridged audio reading by Lynn Redgrave, a stage play and a two-part radio dramatisation for the BBC.
About The Witches (novel) in brief
The Witches is a children’s dark fantasy novel by the British writer Roald Dahl. The story is set partly in Norway and partly in England, and features the experiences of a young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother. The book was adapted into an unabridged audio reading by Lynn Redgrave, a stage play and a two-part radio dramatisation for the BBC. A 1990 film directed by Nicolas Roeg which starred Anjelica Huston and Rowan Atkinson, a 2008 opera by Marcus Paus and Ole Paus, and a 2020 film directed By Robert Zemeckis are also planned. The Witches was originally published in 1983 by Jonathan Cape in London, with illustrations by Quentin Blake. The witches are all ruled by the extremely vicious and powerful Grand High Witch, who has just arrived in England to organize her worst plot ever. But an elderly former witch hunter and her young grandson find out about the evil plan and now they must do everything to stop it and defeat the witches. To a witch, a child smells of fresh dogs’ droppings; the dirtier the child, the less likely she is to smell them.
To a child, a real witch looks exactly like an ordinary woman, but there are ways of telling whether she is a witch. The boy is training his pet mice, William and Mary, given to him as a consolation present by his grandmother after the loss of his parents in a tragic car accident. The witch offers him a snake to tempt him, but he climbs further up the tree and stays there, not daring to come down until his grandmother comes looking for him. When the boy is working on the roof of his tree-house, he sees a strange woman in black staring up at him with an eerie smile, and he quickly registers that she is witch. She tells him how to recognize them, and that he is a retired witch hunter. The grandmother warns the boy to be on his guard, however, since English witches are known to be among the most vicious in the world, notorious for turning children into loathsome creatures so that unsuspecting adults kill them.
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This page is based on the article The Witches (novel) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
