Мишель Робертс – лучшие книги

A stunning war-time novel set in France from Booker-shortlisted author Michèle Roberts.

After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village after mass, in the colour of an undelivered letter.

Jeanne Nerin and Marie-Angèle Baudry grow up, side by side yet apart, in the village of Ste Madeleine. Marie-Angèle is the daughter of the grocer, inflated with ideas of her own piety and rightful place in society. Jeanne's mother washes clothes for a living. She used to be a Jew until this became too dangerous. Jeanne does not think twice about grasping the slender chances life throws at her. Marie-Angèle does not grasp; she aspires to a future of comfort and influence.

When war falls out of the sky, along with it tumbles a new, grown-up world. The village must think on its feet, play its part in a game for which no one knows the rules. Not even the dubious hero with 'business contacts' who sweeps Marie-Angèle off her feet. Not even the reclusive artist living alone with his sensual, red canvases. In these uncertain times, the enemy may be hiding in your garden shed and the truth is all too easily buried under a pyramid of recriminations.

Michèle Roberts's new novel is a mesmerising exploration of guilt, faith, desire and judgment, bringing to life a people at war in a way that is at once lyrical and shocking.

A Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is Michèle Roberts’s acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. Thérèse and Léonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy. Intrigued by parents’ and servants’ guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own elaborate fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village secret and a deep shame that will haunt them in their adult lives.

What does it take for a woman to be judged saintly? In this wily, wonderfully original novel, Michèle Roberts tells the story of the fictional Saint Josephine: her life and death, her childhood and evolution from woman to nun to abbess, her unlikely canonization. The more we discover, the more incredible her sainthood seems. Who was Saint Josephine? Craven nun or fearless miracle worker? Pious role model or seductress? Illuminating Saint Josephine's story are the equally fantastical stories of eleven actual female saints: mad one-armed girls, beauties locked in towers, mothers who encourage their daughters' fatal anorexia, ingenues who seduce and dismember their fathers. Together the stories expose the historical conflict between female sexuality and religion, the roots of female roles in the church, and the troubled love between fathers and daughters. In original exploration of love, faith, and desire, Impossible Saints is a funny, disturbing, and utterly compelling novel about modern women who came before their time.

In the parched soil of Provence, a fifth gospel has been discovered. It is Mary Magdalene's account of Christ's teaching and her relationship with him, and it unveils a new Christianity which embraces the female equally with the male. The author won the 1992 W.H. Smith Literary Award.