The Convent: A Novel
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Publisher Description
"An impressive addition to the works of a master storyteller."—The Independent
The crumbling convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra, hidden on a hill among dense forest. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence—six women cut off from a world they've chosen to leave behind. This all changes on the day that Mother Superior Maria Ines discovers a suitcase punctured with air holes at the entrance to the retreat: a baby, abandoned to its fate. Is it a miracle? Soon she will find that the baby's arrival has consequences beyond her imagining, and that even in her carefully protected sanctuary she is unable to keep the world, or her past, at bay.
In this beautifully told novel, "we witness justice and injustice, theological controversy, the politics of a tiny enclosed society, despair, cruelty, generosity, scandal, suspicion and suicide, all told with immense verve and skill" (London Sunday Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cross an Almod var-esque plot with lean Hemingway prose, and you get the atmospheric latest from Karnezis (The Maze), about an infant boy abandoned on the steps of a convent. The boy is quickly adopted by the Mother Superior, Sister Mar a In s, who runs the convent with a blend of intense devotion and heterodoxy; she has a painful secret in her past and believes the boy is a sign of God's infinite mercy. Her intense desire to keep the child at the convent, rather than send him to an orphanage in town, increasingly pits her against the convent's other inhabitants, especially Sister Ana, an ambitious nun much aggrieved by perceived slights. When Ana finds a bloodstained cloth buried on the convent's grounds and becomes convinced "that the convent was visited by evil," she sets herself to expelling the devil, with grave consequences for all. The sense of slow-burning doom, rendered in deceptively simple prose, culminates in a series of startling revelations. Even when the disclosure strains credibility, the novel's concern with the claims the past makes on the present makes the emotional investment it asks for well worth it.
