Impossible Saints

Michele Roberts

From Shelf: The 1998 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

IMPOSSIBLE SAINTS, hailed as 'dangerously close to perfection' (INDEPENDENT), is Michele Roberts' most exquisite novel to date

Always bold, always provocative, Michele Roberts turns now to the forbidden pleasures and pains of the love between father and daughter and unfolds before us the life and death of Saint Josephine. Holy woman or whore? Upholder of pious or pagan delights? Lowly nun or powerful miracle worker? Or both? And woven throughout her story are the heady and sometimes fearful tales of other female saints - one-armed mad girls, beauties locked in towers, seductive daughters - all women who didn't know their place. Rich with fabulous imagery, IMPOSSIBLE SAINTS is as potent and disturbing as its dangerous themes.'Her fictions are high-risk, unconventional, often apparently unstable; yet are steered with such authority that the otherwise cautious reader is taken almost without realising it into dangerous and exhilarating territory ... She is a writer dedicated to challenging the boundaries by which the idle and unthinking might try to circumscribe her' Rachel Cusk, Sunday Express'Hugely entertaining and genuinely thought-provoking' Julia Flynn, Sunday Telegraph

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