Set in England in 1255, Robyn Cadwallader’s THE ANCHORESS is a startling and strange debut novel about a young girl’s desperate choice to isolate herself from the world.

Sarah is only 17 when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman much like the one who taught Saint Hildegard of Bingen, shut away in a small cell, measuring seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth as well as pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world --- with all its dangers, desires and temptations --- and commit herself to a life of prayer. But it soon becomes clear that even the thick, unforgiving walls of Sarah’s cell cannot keep the outside world away, and her body and soul are still in great danger.

Cadwallader’s powerful novel tells an absorbing and compulsively readable story of faith, desire, shame, fear and the very human need for connection and touch. Compelling, evocative and haunting, THE ANCHORESS is both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable.