St. Augustine Author Madeline Martin Debuts New Novel ‘A Time of Witches’

There is something particularly fitting about discovering a writer of haunting historical fiction living in one of America’s oldest cities. Madeline Martin is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels transport readers into another place and time. She travels the world researching them, spends months buried in historical records and has built a career that takes her to book festivals, speaking engagements and literary events around the country. But home is St. Augustine.

In fact, Martin’s connection to the city stretches back long before the bestseller lists. She moved here in the late 1990s to attend Flagler College, earning a degree in business administration because, at the time, she didn’t believe becoming an author was a realistic career. After graduation, she moved to Jacksonville for corporate work before eventually returning to St. Augustine in 2018. Now, the Flagler graduate who once thought “real people” didn’t become authors has built an international literary career from the same town where that dream once seemed impractical.

And her newest book arrives just in time for Halloween. Released in September, A Time of Witches is a dual-timeline story following two women connected across centuries by family, magic and a terrifying shared experience. In 1645 England, Sybil, the daughter of a healer, finds herself caught in the witch trials and facing death at the stake. In present-day Savannah, her descendant Lilith is plagued by recurring dreams of being burned alive—dreams that eventually lead her to England, an abandoned manor and the discovery of a woman in her family’s past whose fate may somehow be connected to her own.

For Martin, that particular nightmare required surprisingly little imagination. The idea began about 25 years ago, when Martin herself was in high school and repeatedly dreamed that she was being burned alive at the stake.

“I was like, this was either me in a past life or maybe it was an ancestor,” she remembers. The idea stayed with her for decades. When she began seeing more novels about witches finding an audience, Martin realized the story she had carried with her since adolescence might finally have its moment. What followed was the kind of historical deep dive Martin has made a hallmark of her work.

She estimates that each of her historical novels involves about 10 months of research and more than 100 nonfiction books, although sometimes the detail she needs might come from a single chapter or even a paragraph. Just as important is going there herself. Martin travels to the locations she writes about because standing in a place, hearing it and experiencing its atmosphere adds something research alone cannot.

For A Time of Witches, that meant traveling to England to research the 17th-century witch trials as well as spending time in Savannah for the contemporary side of the story.

The history behind the novel is unsettling partly because accusations of witchcraft did not necessarily require anything supernatural. Women could draw suspicion for their knowledge of medicinal herbs, their independence, their personalities or simply finding themselves on the wrong side of a frightened community. Martin became particularly interested in the women who served as local healers, using generations of knowledge about plants and remedies at a time when medicine itself could be primitive and dangerous.

That tension—between a woman considered valuable to her community and one suddenly considered threatening—gave Martin fertile territory for a novel about fear, power and survival.

Yet for all the atmosphere surrounding A Time of Witches, Martin’s path to becoming a bestselling novelist may be an equally compelling story. She spent 16 years working as a business analyst while building her writing career alongside it. For years, she wrote six to eight books annually while maintaining her full-time job and raising her daughters, sometimes surviving on only about four hours of sleep a night. After being laid off in February 2020, she finally made the leap to writing full time.

That period gave Martin the opportunity to research and write The Last Bookshop in London. The novel eventually landed on the New York Times bestseller list and changed the trajectory of her career. There was no overnight success. Martin estimates it took roughly 15 years and more than 35 books to reach the bestseller list. “I write because I can’t not write,” she says. Even when she isn’t physically at a keyboard, she says, the stories are still unfolding in her head. Martin has already turned in her next novel, The Forgotten Pages, set inside a Victorian women’s reformation home and scheduled for fall 2027.

For now, though, October belongs to witches. And perhaps the best part for St. Augustine readers is knowing that the author conjuring up centuries-old England, haunted dreams and women separated by generations is doing so from right here at home—a New York Times bestseller shaped, at least in part, by the little college and historic city that helped start her story.