Rapture by Emily Maguire
An imaginative and audacious historical novel from the best-selling author of Love Objects and An Isolated Incident.
'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
'In Rapture, Maguire has performed the dazzling feat of making the earthly feel miraculous and the heavenly feel intimate. This glorious novel both burns and sings.' - Fiona McFarlane, author of The Sun Walks Down
'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.
Praise for Rapture:
'Rapture is the perfect title for this wonderful, original story of devotion, passion and purpose. I felt myself transported, seamlessly, to another time, long ago, with Agnes, the novel's determined protagonist, as my guide. I loved her.' - Sofie Laguna, author of Infinite Splendours
'A strange and magnificent vision of a novel: in Agnes, Maguire embodies a ferocity of both the mind and body, ambition and humility, wisdom, desire, sacrifice, grace and a refusal to follow the path laid down for her. Maguire's language and storytelling soars. I was transfixed. Maguire effortlessly transitions to deeply researched and utterly compelling historical fiction in the style of Lauren Groff, Hannah Kent, Anthony Doerr and Pip Williams.' - Kate Mildenhall, author of The Hummingbird Effect
