The Convent
  • Published: 15 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099502791
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $19.99

The Convent

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A major new novel from one of our finest young writers, author of Little Infamies and The Maze.

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.
  • Published: 15 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099502791
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Panos Karnezis

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and moved to England in 1992. He was awarded an MA in Creative Writing by the University of East Anglia. He is the author of a highly praised collection of stories, Little Infamies, and three novels, The Maze, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel award, The Birthday Party and The Convent.

Also by Panos Karnezis

The Fugitives
The Birthday Party
The Maze
See all

Praise for The Convent

Unexpectedly haunting, its details catching like splinters in that part of the imagination that responds to pure storytelling

Times Literary Supplement

Panos Karnezis writes with assurance of a world which must, perforce, be closed to him

Daily Mail

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

Written with aplomb and canniness

Ursula K Le Guin, Guardian

This fragrant, fond and faintly otherworldly novel, with its final, poignant twist, is a memorable read

The Lady

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

An impressive addition to the works of a master storyteller

Independent
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