Convent

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.

Unexpectedly haunting, its details catching like splinters in that part of the imagination that responds to pure storytelling, 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, 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, An impressive addition to the works of a master storyteller, This fragrant, fond and faintly otherworldly novel, with its final, poignant twist, is a memorable read

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied engineering at Oxford and worked in industry before starting to write in English. He studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Little Infamies, a collection of connected short stories set in a nameless Greek village, and two previous novels; The Maze, shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award and The Birthday Party. Panos Karnezis lives in London.