Author(s): Emily Maguire

Fiction | Option A Oct 2024 Adult

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.