‘One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power and beauty’ SARAH WATERS
In memory of the wife who had once dishonoured and always despised him, Brian de Retteville founded Oby – a twelfth-century convent in a hidden corner of Norfolk. Two centuries later the Benedictine community is well established there and, as befits a convent whose origin had such chequered motives, the inhabitants are prey to the ambitions, squabbles, jealousies and pleasures of less spiritual environments. An outbreak of the Black Death, the collapse of the convent spire, the Bishop’s visitation and a nun’s disappearance are interwoven with the everyday life of the nuns, novices, successive Prioresses and the nun’s priest, in this affectionate and ironic observation of the more wordly history of a religious order.
In memory of the wife who had once dishonoured and always despised him, Brian de Retteville founded Oby – a twelfth-century convent in a hidden corner of Norfolk. Two centuries later the Benedictine community is well established there and, as befits a convent whose origin had such chequered motives, the inhabitants are prey to the ambitions, squabbles, jealousies and pleasures of less spiritual environments. An outbreak of the Black Death, the collapse of the convent spire, the Bishop’s visitation and a nun’s disappearance are interwoven with the everyday life of the nuns, novices, successive Prioresses and the nun’s priest, in this affectionate and ironic observation of the more wordly history of a religious order.
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Reviews
One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power and beauty
The Corner That Held Them is witty, knowledgeable, and gently on the side of women
A very subversive novel about a Fenland nunnery during the years of the Black Death, which sounds like not a barrel of laughs but is very, very funny and haunting and strange like all her novels. The reason I love books about nuns is that the enclosed world of the convent is such a brilliant metaphor. Nun books are as much about politics and power as they are about spirituality.
A magnificent recreation of the life of a medieval convent, dense with physical detail and imagined lives
A spellbinding piece of historical fiction - spare, luminous . . . One starts rereading as soon as one has reached the last page
