ACT Book of the Year, People’s Choice Award
Canberra Critics Circle Award for Fiction 2015
Shortlist: The Indie Book Awards, Debut Fiction, 2016; Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, 2016
Longlist: ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, 2016;
Matt Richell Award, New Writer of the Year, 2016.
Highly Commended: ACT Book of the Year, 2016.
The Anchoress
England, 1255: Sarah is only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a small cell, measuring seven paces by nine, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing her sister in childbirth and the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world, with all its dangers, desires and temptations, and to commit herself to a life of prayer and service to God. But even the thick, unforgiving walls of her cell cannot keep the outside world away, and it is soon clear that Sarah’s body and soul are still in great danger.
An absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear and the very human need for connection and touch. With a poetic intelligence, Cadwallader explores the relationship between the mind, body and spirit in medieval England, in a story that will hold the reader in a spell until the very last page. An absorbing, entirely human and compulsively readable story of faith, desire, shame, fear and the very human need for connection and touch. Powerful, evocative and haunting, The Anchoress is both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable.
Book Reviews
“Robyn Cadwallader does the real work of historical fiction, creating a detailed, sensuous and richly imagined shard of the past. She has successfully placed her narrator, the anchoress, in that tantalizing, precarious, delicate realm: convincingly of her own distant era, yet emotionally engaging and vividly present to us in our own.
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“Sarah’s story is so beautiful, so rich, so strange, unexpected and thoughtful – also suspenseful.
I loved this book.
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“An intense, atmospheric and very assured debut, this is one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of the year … this one will appeal to readers who loved Hannah Kent’s bestselling Burial Rites.
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“Cadwallader’s writing evokes a heightened attention to the senses. You might never read a novel so sensuous yet unconcerned with romantic love. For this alone it is worth seeking out. But also because The Anchoress achieves what every historical novel attempts, reimagining the past while opening a new window … to our present lives.
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“Cadwallader is a poet of loneliness; few writers have captured so completely the essential madness that accompanies hermitage.”
“Surprisingly suspenseful … has the quiet intensity of a devotional chant. The contemplative tone of this beautiful novel leaves behind a feeling of calm and restoration, and a deeper sense of the power of the written word and of the myriad ways in which freedom can be experienced.
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“From its medieval cell this debut novel soars into the light.This is a novel of visions, demons, and ghostly presences, balanced against the world of the flesh and its temptations … It is also a novel of page-turning grace. The language is frequently beautiful, and Sarah’s choices linger long in the mind.”
“Cadwallader’s vivid period descriptions set a stunning backdrop for this beautiful first novel as Sarah rejects a larger world that will not allow her to live on her own terms and goes about creating a smaller one that will. Sarah’s path will intrigue readers at the crossroads of historical fiction, spirituality, and even feminism as she faces the internal and external pressures on women of the Middle Ages.”