Title: Sycorax

Author: Nydia Hetherington

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Quercus

Publication Date: 26th February 2026 (Paperback)

Rating: 4/5

Cover:

Summary:

Born of the sun and moon, shaped by fire and malady, comes a young woman whose story has never been told . . .

They call her Sycorax. Seer. Sage. Sorceress.

Outcast by society and all alone in the world, Sycorax must find a way to understand her true nature. But as her powers begin to grow, so too do the suspicions of the local townspeople. For knowledge can be dangerous, and a woman’s knowledge is the most dangerous of all . . .

With a great storm brewing on the horizon, Sycorax finds herself in increasing peril – but will her powers save her, or will they spell the end for them all?

A beautifully written and deeply moving imagining of what came before Shakespeare’s The Tempest from the author of A Girl Made of Air.

Review:

Sycorax is a sort of reimagining, or perhaps more accurately, an origin story of the unseen witch character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the play, she is termed a ‘blue-eyed hag’ and is generally portrayed as a malevolent or wicked character. However, here Nydia Hetherington has reimagined her as a more complex, layered, and sympathetic character who has endured suffering and been ostracised and judged cruelly by society. One of the things I really appreciated about Sycorax is the chronic illness and pain representation. It is something I live with personally, and I thought its inclusion in Sycorax’s story added so much depth and poignancy to this tale of persecution and being ‘othered’. I resonated incredibly strongly with this theme throughout and loved Hetherington’s note at the beginning of the book about how her interpretation of this aspect of Sycorax came about. It is also a beautifully written book, lyrical and poetic in style and full of myth, magic, sadness, and pain. There is a vividness to the prose which strongly evokes the character herself, and the landscape just beautifully. Sycorax is very much a character-driven novel, giving a voice to a traditionally silenced woman from The Tempest, and it does that incredibly powerfully, adding a rawness and humanity to the famous witch that will remain in the mind of readers long after finishing. If you enjoy mythological retellings, and stories of misunderstood and misaligned women then I think you will enjoy Sycorax. 

★★★★

Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

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