The Convent – A Novel - Hardcover

Karnezis, Panos

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393056996 ISBN 13: 9780393056990

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

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).

About this title

Review:

Starred Review. A haunting and psychologically dense novel.

Karnezis slowly peels back the psychological layers while maintaining a sense of spiritual dread, even as it becomes increasingly obvious that the explanation for where the infant came from is the most earthly one possible.

Book Description:

A major new novel from one of our finest young writers, author of Little Infamies and The Maze

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393056996
• ISBN 13: 9780393056990
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224