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The Corner That Held Them
- Author
- Sylvia Townsend Warner
- Narrator
- Emma Gregory
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 12 April 2022
- Run Time
- 14 hours 38 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
A unique novel about life in a fourteenth-century convent by one of England’s most original authors
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community.
What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
Critics Review
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“One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power, and beauty.”
Sarah Waters, New York Times bestselling author
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“Warner’s style is delicate and arch…Though she teeters on the edge of satire, she lands instead…on poignancy.”
New York Times
User Reviews
No reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Sylvia Townsend Warner
- Narrator
- Emma Gregory
- Duration
- 14 hours 38 minutes
- Release Date
- 12 April 2022
- ISBN
- 9798200923540
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Historical fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Religious and spiritual fiction
Synopsis
A unique novel about life in a fourteenth-century convent by one of England’s most original authorsSylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
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