The Convent

by Panos Karnezis

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 Mother Superior Maria Ines discovers a suitcase punctured with air-holes at the entrance to the retreat. Soon she is to find 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.

(From Publisher).

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967. He came to England in 1992 to study engineering, and worked in industry before starting to write. He was awarded an MA in Creative Writing by the University of East Anglia. His first book, Little Infamies, was published in 2002. He lives in London.

A novel that plays on ideas about love, respectability and duty. The writing is beguiling and intriguing and invites the reader's full attention.