The Convent - Softcover

"Unexpectedly haunting, its details catching like splinters in that part of the imagination that responds to pure storytelling" (Times Literary Supplement)

"The Convent is at once a still, almost silent thing, and a blistering human drama...Karnezis's great skill is in evoking the haunting beauty of lost places and souls... There is a strength and confidence to Karnezis's prose" (The Times)

"Impressive... 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" (Sunday Times)

"An impressive addition to the works of a master storyteller" (Independent)

"This fragrant, fond and faintly otherworldly novel, with its final, poignant twist, is a memorable read" (The Lady)

Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad...

The convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence; six women cut off from the world they've chosen to leave behind.

Everything changes on the day that a suitcase punctured with air-holes is discovered on the convent steps. Soon Mother Superior Maria Ines finds that the box and its contents are to have consequences beyond her imagining, and that even in her carefully protected sanctuary she is unable to keep the world, or her past, at bay.