Rapture

Local Description

Matilda Bookshop Review

An arresting novel, pulsating with life in all of its unbearable joy and pain. We follow the elevation of Agnes from bastard girlchild of an English priest to lauded Christian mystic and eventually Father of the Holy Church. Of course this position of sanctified privilege requires the denial of many elements of Agnes’ self, including her womanhood. The nature of Rapture is as dualistic as that of its compelling protagonist. Concerned with both the divine and the earthly, entire passages seem mired in base misery and then there is searing light just when you think you can take no more. I was captivated. Emilie

Description

An imaginative and audacious historical novel from the best-selling author of Love Objects and An Isolated Incident.

'Her self is an illusion yet it is one beloved by most everyone who has heard her speak . . . She is thirty-three years old and there is no one else in the world who knows who she used to be.' 

The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman.

So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful-and deadly-currency.

And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known-and loved. Rapture is an astonishing, transformative and audacious novel that confirms Emily Maguire as one of our finest writers. 

Reviews

'Rapture is astonishing - a scorching vision of a book. Drawing on history, legend, speculation and gossip, Maguire's medieval girl-Pope story is made of many things: flesh and earth and blood; ambition and abnegation; rage and transcendence, all pouring into this pagan, biblical, strange and mighty work from an imagination in soaring flight.' - Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional

'One of the most big-hearted novels I've ever read. Each person fully formed, each scene and new catastrophe rooted in truth.' Bri Lee, author of Eggshell Skull

'Bold, furious, unapologetic and deeply insightful.' Sofie Laguna, author of Infinite Splendours

'A stunning, immersive novel that will change the conversation about class and about what possessions mean. It's important and funny and sad and beautiful and I absolutely adored it.' Kathryn Heyman, author of Storm and Grace and Fury