DAMARISCOTTA — Get ready: The bewitchingly talented Katherine Howe, author of NYTimes best seller, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and will be our guest on Friday the 22nd at 7 p.m. She’ll be reading from and discussing her new novel, Conversion.

It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t. First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.

Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit— comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago.

Inspired by true events— from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school— Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?

Katherine Howe has hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for the National Geographic Channel, and her fiction has been translated into over twenty-five languages. Conversion is presently being made into a movie.A native Texan, she lives in New England and upstate New York, where she teaches at Cornell and is at work on her next novel.