The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

**A warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family--and a new love--changes the course of her life./b> As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don’t mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she’s used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously. But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and…Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he’s concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat. As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn''t the only danger in the world, and when a threat comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn’t know she was looking for....

Praise for The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

"Witty, witchy, and wonderfully romantic, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches will warm your heart with its endearing characters, grumpy-sunshine love story, and gorgeously sparkling magic."--India Holton, author of *The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels

“This gorgeously cozy romantic fantasy sparkles with real magic, love, and joy. A perfect comfort read.”—Stephanie Burgis, author of *Scales and Sensibility and Snowspelled

"Absolutely charming, adorably witty, and features an endearing cast of characters and a wonderfully tricky and romantic plot. This is a lighthearted tale of a coven everyone will long to join!"—Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches
 
“Sangu Mandanna spins a bewitching tale of found family, magic, and the power of love. Dark humor and bright writing abound in The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, and readers are sure to be charmed.”—Award-winning author Suleikha Snyder

"The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is a warm and witchy hug of a book. Full of endearing characters, romance and found family, it's the cozy magical romance you've been waiting for. I absolutely adored it!"—Tasha Suri, author of *The Jasmine Throne

Auteur

Sangu Mandanna is the author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom, and several other novels about magic, monsters and myths. She lives in Norwich, a city in the east of England, with her husband and three kids.

Résumé
“This is one of my coziest reads of the last year, and I find myself thinking about its enchanted setting all the time.”−Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author

A warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family—and a new love—changes the course of her life.

As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don’t mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she’s used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously.
 
But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and…Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he’s concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat.
 
As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when peril comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn’t know she was looking for....
 

Échantillon de lecture

Chapter One

 

The Very Secret Society of Witches met on the third Thursday of every third month, but that was just about the only thing that never changed. They never met in the same place twice; the last meeting, for instance, had been in Belinda Nkala's front room and had involved freshly baked scones, and the one before that had been in the glorious sunshine of Agatha Jones's garden. This meeting, on a cold, wet October afternoon, happened to be taking place on a tiny, abandoned pier in the Outer Hebrides.

 

A pier. In the Outer Hebrides. In October.

 

Of course, they weren't actually called the Very Secret Society of Witches. They weren't called anything at all, which was why Mika Moon had decided to come up with a name for them herself. She had cycled through several alternatives first, like the League of Extraordinary Witches and the Super Secret Society of Witchy Witches. She was still rather fond of the latter.

 

The ridiculous names were mostly to annoy Primrose, the ancient and very proper head of the group, a position Primrose had presumably bestowed upon herself at some point in the past hundred years or so. (This might have been something of an exaggeration on Mika's part, but it was impossible to tell how old Primrose really was. She wouldn't say.)

 

Now, huddled as deep into her coat as she could get, Mika rocked impatiently on the balls of her feet as twenty other witches joined her on the pier. This, she supposed, was another thing that almost never changed: their number. Mika was one of the newest additions to the thing-that-was-definitely-not-a-society, and she'd been part of it for almost ten years, which meant it had been a very long time since they'd welcomed anyone new. This was not to say that there were only twenty-one adult witches in all of Britain; witches were uncommon, certainly, but Mika knew that there were others out there. Primrose, who had appointed herself the duty of finding and inviting new witches to the not-society, had mentioned that some had turned her down over the years.

 

Mika found it difficult to believe anyone had been able to resist Primrose's persuasions (which an uncharitable person might say better resembled genteel bullying), but still, it was rather comforting to know that this small, soaked group on the pier wasn't all that was left of them.

 

Not that their numbers mattered. These meetings were the only time any of them were ever supposed to speak to one another. Primrose Beatrice Everly would never dream of telling anyone how to live their lives (so she said), but she was of the firm opinion that Rules would keep them all safe and so those Rules really ought to be followed. Too much magic left unchecked in one place, she said, would draw attention. For the sake of all of them, they had to lead sepa…