The Witch of Portobello

The novel is structured as a collection of testimonial accounts from multiple narrators, compiled by an unnamed figure who presents them as raw transcriptions rather than a traditional biography. The testimonies concern the life, apparent death, and spiritual mission of a woman known as Athena, born Sherine Khalil. Only in the book's final pages does the compiler's identity become clear, along with the truth about Athena's fate.

Heron Ryan, a 44-year-old journalist, opens the testimonies by recounting how he met Athena in Transylvania while filming a BBC documentary and fell in love with her despite his rational worldview. Through her, he witnessed rituals and trances he would never have believed possible. He reflects on the public gatherings she later held in London's Portobello Road neighborhood, gatherings that spiraled out of control and earned her the nickname "the Witch of Portobello." Andrea McCain, a 32-year-old actress and Heron's girlfriend, accuses Athena of seducing Heron under the guise of spiritual teaching. Despite her animosity, Andrea acknowledges that Athena's work of reawakening feminine divinity had real potential. Deidre O'Neill, a 37-year-old Scottish doctor known as Edda, serves as Athena's spiritual teacher and describes her as someone who refused to suppress her true self, embodying four classic feminine archetypes: the Virgin, the Martyr, the Saint, and the Witch.

Athena's origins are told by her adoptive mother, Samira R. Khalil. Samira and her husband, a successful Lebanese industrialist in Beirut, were unable to conceive and traveled to Sibiu, in the Transylvania region of Romania, during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. At an orphanage, Samira chose a baby girl and named her Sherine. When Sherine was five, an uncle suggested the nickname Athena to ease difficulties with an Arab name abroad; the girl insisted on using it. From an early age, Athena displayed intense religious devotion and claimed to see invisible friends, including a woman in white who resembled the Virgin Mary. One night she told Samira that hell was close. The next morning, four men were murdered in Beirut, marking the start of Lebanon's civil war. Her father took her premonition seriously, and the family fled to London.

Lukás Jessen-Petersen, Athena's ex-husband and an engineer, recounts meeting her at university, where she nearly attacked a fellow student for insulting the Middle East. After less than a year, Athena dropped out and told Lukás she wanted to marry and have a baby. Though only 20, he chose love over freedom. Father Giancarlo Fontana, a 72-year-old priest who befriended Athena through their shared love of music and worship, recalls her confiding that she had contemplated suicide and believed motherhood was the only thing anchoring her to life.

After their son Viorel's birth, Lukás struggles financially and feels neglected. He asks for a divorce. Athena appears calm and resigned. The divorce brings further devastation: Father Fontana, bound by Church doctrine forbidding divorced persons from receiving communion, refuses to give Athena the Eucharist before the entire congregation. Humiliated, she erupts in fury, cursing the church and vowing never to return.

Athena's life then takes transformative turns. Her Polish landlord, Pavel Podbielski, introduces her to the "Search for the Vertex," a dance practice derived from a Siberian tradition in which inhabitants danced to exhaustion to access an inner light. Athena joins his group and shares the practice with colleagues at her bank, where her energy so transforms the branch that the bank sends her to Dubai. There, she studies Arabic calligraphy with Nabil Alaihi, a Bedouin teacher who helps her cultivate patience and stillness. After nearly a year, Nabil tells her she has mastered the form but not the "blank spaces" between words, the moments when unwanted thoughts intrude. He identifies these blank spaces as connected to her unknown birth mother.

Despite her adoptive mother's anguish, Athena obtains her adoption papers and travels to Romania. In Bucharest, both Heron and Edda independently notice her in a hotel foyer. Edda, in Romania for her spiritual teacher's funeral, recognizes something extraordinary in Athena. In Sibiu, a Romani restaurant owner named Vosho reluctantly guides Athena to Liliana, her birth mother, a seamstress living in poverty. Over several days, Liliana teaches Athena Romani customs and the worship of the Great Mother, a feminine divine figure central to her tradition. On their final morning, Athena tells Liliana that the blank spaces in her life have begun to transform into pauses. Liliana asks forgiveness; Athena embraces her in tears.

Athena returns to London joyful but restless. She visits Edda in Scotland, where Edda performs a candlelight ritual and gives her a crucial instruction: Find a student and teach what you do not know, allowing the Mother, the same feminine divine presence Athena has encountered, to speak through you. Edda's parting advice: "Teach people to be different. That's all!" (134).

Back in London, Athena begins holding Monday gatherings where she makes attendees dance against the rhythm of the music, an act of deliberate disharmony. During one session, she becomes distressed. When she looks up, her face has changed. Speaking as "Hagia Sofia," the name she gives to the presence within her, Athena diagnoses an elderly actor with prostate cancer, tells the theater director to accept his homosexuality, and cures Heron's chronic insomnia. A doctor later confirms the cancer diagnosis. Hagia Sofia later instructs Athena to take Andrea as her student despite their mutual hostility, and Andrea accepts. The gatherings grow rapidly, moving from Athena's apartment to a warehouse on Portobello Road and drawing hundreds. Andrea, transformed by the experience, announces she is leaving Heron, not out of anger at Athena but because she has discovered her own path.

The growth attracts hostility. Reverend Ian Buck, a local evangelical minister, organizes a demonstration against what he calls a Satanic cult. Violence erupts, and tabloid coverage brings both celebrity and danger. Legal proceedings are filed to remove Viorel from Athena's custody. Athena stops holding meetings.

In private, she records a testament for Heron, revealing she has received death threats and bought a gun, vowing no one will take Viorel alive. Dancing into trance as Hagia Sofia, she tells Heron she loves him, though not in the way his human side desires, and declares that Andrea is the right person to continue the mission because she has more experience and discretion. The court rules in Athena's favor on custody, but she vanishes. Two months later, Heron learns that the body of Sherine Khalil has been found in Hampstead, brutally murdered.

The book's postface reveals the truth. The unnamed compiler is Athena's boyfriend, a Scotland Yard detective she mentioned throughout but whom no one ever met. Athena is alive, living in hiding near Snowdonia National Park in Wales; the transcript is a birthday present for her. Viorel has recorded his first musical composition for her birthday celebration. Athena chooses to disappear because her mission is being corrupted by celebrity worship. The detective stages her death by planting her blood and hair at the scene of an unidentified murder victim in Hampstead and connecting the case to a genuine suicide in Portugal. Andrea is now carrying forward Athena's work discreetly, building a network of people in positions of influence. Athena's public persona had to die so the mission could survive. The narrator confesses he compiled the testimonies to understand why Athena loved him. The answer came in her final recorded conversation with Heron: "Love simply is" (268).