Excerpts cozy fantasy Read an Excerpt From A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna A witch has a second chance to get her magical powers—and her life—back on track… By Sangu Mandanna | Published on July 8, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, a cozy romantasy by Sangu Mandanna, out from Berkley on July 15th. Sera Swan used to be one of the most powerful witches in Britain. Then she resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine from the (very recently) dead, lost most of her magic, befriended a semi-villainous talking fox, and was exiled from her Guild. Now she (slightly reluctantly and just a bit grumpily) helps Jasmine run an enchanted inn in Lancashire, where she deals with her quirky guests’ shenanigans, tries to keep said talking fox in check, and longs for the future that seems lost to her. But then she finds out about an old spell that could hold the key to restoring her power…Enter Luke Larsen, handsome and icy magical historian, who arrives on a dark winter evening and just might know how to unlock the spell’s secrets. Luke has absolutely no interest in getting involved in the madcap goings-on of the inn and is definitely not about to let a certain bewitching innkeeper past his walls, so no one is more surprised than he is when he agrees to help Sera with her spell. Worse, he might actually be thawing.Running an inn, reclaiming lost magic, and staying one step ahead of the watchful Guild is a lot for anyone, but Sera Swan is about to discover that she doesn’t have to do it alone…and that the weird, wonderful family she’s made might be the best magic of all. If Luke were a different sort of person, perhaps he might have been able to settle into this rhythm. There was a part of him that wanted to, that wanted to believe it was possible for somebody’s life to be nothing but this: the work he loved, his sister tearing around a wild, overgrown garden in bare feet with a smudge of jam on her chin, hot cups of strong tea and scones that crumbled in his mouth, and fairy‑tale evenings by the fire with a book. But that, there, was the problem. Fairy-tale. Reality was traffic and steeples and old bookshops in Edinburgh. Reality was tedious meetings with Guild bureaucrats over whether the acquisition of a priceless book was really worth the funding. Reality was the question mark over Posy’s future, and his own, and the cold, secret fear that came late at night and made him wonder if maybe it wasn’t normal, really, to have nobody in your life you could say all of that to. This place, this inn, which was every bit as batty as its ridiculous name promised, was not reality as Luke knew it. This was a place of fables and stories and peculiar magic, and such a place, he was certain, had no place in the real world. So Luke did not settle. He waited, calmly, icily, resigned, for the fairy tale to end. Funnily enough, the first disruption to the rhythm of those early days did nothing to dispel Luke’s certainty that the Batty Hole Inn was an incomprehensible departure from reality, good sense, and all things regular. He woke, blinking, groggy, to the sound of something going on outside. Posy was fast asleep in the other twin bed, having been awake and remarkably chirpy from the hours of two to six in the morning, but it sounded like everybody else was up and about. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and swapping his sweatpants for jeans, Luke checked the time on his phone. Half past nine, which was frankly too early for mayhem at even the best of times. He descended two flights of creaky stairs, passed through the long hallway, and crossed the kitchen to the open back door, by which point the indistinct sounds had become shrieks and hollers of “Catch it!” and “Not that way! That way!” Jasmine stood at the edge of the stone patio, leaning on her cane, tutting gently to herself as Luke drew level with her. The garden looked like a meteor had hit it in the middle of the night. In fact, for a moment, Luke wondered if a meteor had hit it— what else could possibly have overturned half the earth, sent large clumps of grass flying in every direction, beheaded a few dozen wildflowers, decimated most of Matilda’s vegetables, and even apparently laid waste to Sera’s red wellies?—but then, at the heart of the disaster, he saw Matilda and Nicholas. Trying, and failing, to catch a goat. “I thought Rule One was no goats,” Luke remarked. Jasmine nodded. Luke wondered if her cheerful calm was an ominous indication that these things happened rather too often around here. “Matilda,” Jasmine explained, “was of the view that if she borrowed a goat from the Medieval Fair, and showed Sera just how sweet and adorable it was, Sera would change her mind.” “Just how many goats did she borrow?” Pressing her lips together like she was trying not to laugh, Jasmine said, “One.” Buy the Book A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping Sangu Mandanna Buy Book A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping Sangu Mandanna Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Luke looked at the garden, and then looked at the small goat merrily eluding its would-be captors, and then looked at the garden again. “One goat did all this?” “In just over an hour,” Jasmine confirmed. “Can’t see this changing Sera’s mind, can you?” Luke said wryly. “Thank you for that excellent contribution!” Matilda wailed from halfway down the garden. “Now get over here and help us catch this dratted creature! We have maybe half an hour to corral this menace, return him to the Fair, and fix this mess before Sera gets back from the supermarket and murders us all!” “I don’t see why she’d murder me,” Luke pointed out. “She’s not going to murder anybody,” Jasmine said in a wounded tone of voice. “She’ll be a little cross that the garden has been completely destroyed, and who could possibly blame her, but it’s not like she’s a terrifying dragon who’ll gobble everybody up.” “You’d deserve it if she did gobble you up,” Nicholas said to Matilda, deeply disapproving. “How could you? That you’d even dream of causing Lady Sera the slightest anguish—” “I would never, you sweet, ridiculous, lovestruck puppy!” Matilda shot back. “Not on purpose!” “Lovestruck?” Nicholas was appalled. “I’m not in love with her! I am a loyal knight! I would no more make advances on my lady than I would cut off a single lock of her glorious hair!” “Does he say these things to Sera?” Luke asked Jasmine with interest. “He does,” said Jasmine. “Are you sure? He seems to still be alive.” “Don’t you start,” Jasmine said reproachfully. Luke relented. “How’s she really going to feel about this?” Jasmine gave him a long, searching look before saying, “She’ll never say it, but she loves this house. Every creaky stair, every crumbling brick, every bit of dirt under our feet. We all know it. You don’t really think Matilda’s panicking because she’s afraid of Sera’s wrath, do you?” At Luke’s furrowed brow, she explained, “You see, what’s going to happen is Sera will come home, and she’ll glower, and she’ll compete with Matilda to see which of them can be more dramatic, and then she’ll put this mess to rights even if it takes weeks, but the whole time, what she’ll actually be is quietly, devastatingly upset.” Luke had never heard a word as understated as upset hold so much weight, but somehow, in this woman’s gentle, dignified voice, and in the honest, tender simplicity of her answer, it felt weightier than almost anything else. Resigned, Luke heard himself say, “Matilda, maybe you and Nicholas ought to go to the Fair and bring the goat’s owner back with you. Trying to catch it yourselves obviously isn’t working.” “Go there?” Matilda’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why? The man must have a phone.” “And risk him saying he can’t get away until lunchtime?” Luke replied without missing a beat. “Like you said, we have maybe half an hour before Sera gets home. If you get going right now, you might just be able to get rid of the goat before she sees it. I’ll see what I can do about sorting out the mess here.” “I shall be honoured to be of service to you in that endeavour, sir,” said Nicholas. “You’ll need a strong pair of arms and a devoted, unwavering heart.” “Matilda doesn’t know her way around the Fair like you do, dearest,” Jasmine said at once. “If we want to be quick, you’d better go with her.” Giving Luke a look of deep gratitude, Jasmine whisked Matilda and Nicholas away, ferrying them herself out to the car to prevent either from doubling back at a most inconvenient moment. Luke got to work. First, the goat. His magic was a library of old books, the rustle of its pages a constant, comforting hum of background noise in his mind. The spines of spellbooks cracked open when he wanted to cast a spell, pages turning until the spell he needed was at his fingertips, and the spell he needed right now was one that would lull an animal to sleep. It was a tricky spell, particularly for somebody like Luke, who, on top of having a completely ordinary amount of magic, tended not to mess about with spells that affected living things. Take the goat, for example. The sleepy spell was supposed to conjure lavender and lullabies and other soporific sorts of things, but as the fingers of one of Luke’s hands moved in the air, almost like he was playing notes on an invisible piano, the goat wasn’t having it. Like a toddler rebelling at the first sign of drowsiness, determined to put bedtime off as long as possible, the goat bucked and baaed and, outraged, tried to chew at the knee of Luke’s jeans. Luke refused to relent, even with one very soggy knee, and bit by bit, the infernal creature was bested. Once the goat was drooling blissfully on an undamaged patch of grass not far from the disgusted chickens, Luke moved on to his next spell. It was a much easier one, and also a much more tedious one, but frankly, Luke felt like he could do with a bit of tedium right about now. The spell was the one witches usually used when they wanted to summon their coat from across the room or, say, arrest the fall of a child who insisted on jumping off balconies, but on this particular occasion, Luke needed to use it to restore many, many clumps of grass and ravaged lumps of earth to their rightful places. Matilda, Nicholas, and the goat’s exasperated owner arrived just as he was finishing up. Matilda grabbed Luke’s face in her hands and planted a smacker of a kiss on his forehead, Nicholas goggled at the repaired garden in awe, and the owner of the goat retrieved the goat, muttering, “Don’t see what all the fuss was about, everything looks fine to me,” as he departed. After that, the only thing left for Luke to do was to salvage what he could in Matilda’s vegetable patch. Jasmine convinced Matilda and Nicholas to go inside for a restorative cup of tea so that Luke could have a few more minutes unobserved. He didn’t have quite enough magic to revive beheaded wildflowers or regrow partly digested vegetables, but he took stock of what had survived (one pumpkin, a handful of pepper plants, and three artichokes, all of which probably had Sera’s magic to thank for their resilience in the face of the goat’s onslaught) and tidied up the rest of the patch. “It’s adorable that anybody thinks anything happens in this house that I don’t know about,” a voice said behind him. He stood, turning. Sera was studying the garden. Luke had a feeling she could see every seam and stitch of his magic. She looked intrigued. “Was it a goat?” He cracked a smile. “Of course it was a goat.” She was quiet for a moment. Then, pushing her windblown hair behind one ear, she turned to look at him. “You fixed it.” “I fixed what I could. You’ll need new wellies.” “You didn’t have to do that.” “No,” Luke agreed. She smiled, a proper smile, one that reached all the way into her eyes. “Thank you.” It felt essential, somehow, that Luke look away. He nodded at the house. “Are you going to tell them you know?” “No, I think I’ll take that one to my grave.” As she stomped across the overgrown grass back to the house, Luke thought he was beginning to understand. Matilda’s despair over the goat she’d so optimistically brought home for a visit. Nicholas’s chivalrous outrage. Jasmine saying quietly, devastatingly upset. Sera choosing to pretend not to know. It seemed at first glance like ridiculous theatre, unnecessary and a bit silly, but at the heart of it, weren’t they just a handful of people trying to be good to one another? It was the first thing about the inn that made sense to him. It would probably be the last thing too. Excerpted from A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, copyright © 2025 by Sangu Mandanna. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping</i> by Sangu Mandanna appeared first on Reactor.