In 1895 twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary At first some said that the fairies had taken her into their stronghold in a nearby hill from where she would emerge riding a white horse But then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave Her husband father aunt & four cousins were arrested & charged while newspapers in nearby Clonmel & then in Dublin Cork London & further afield attempted to make sense of what had happened In this lurid & fascinating episode set in the last decade of the nineteenth century we witness the collision of town & country of storytelling & science of old & new The torture & burning of Bridget Cleary caused a sensation in 1895 which continues to reverberate more than a hundred years later Winner of the Irish Times Prize for Non-Fiction